The US Supreme Court will rule on whether employees have the right to privacy when sending text messages on devices supplied by their employers.
Given who is sitting on the court and their general sympathies, the answer likely is “No, employees do not.”
The bigger question, though, is how dumb can a cop be? And the biggest question is what employers will do to prevent employees from “stealing” time when everyone is walking around with their own personal networks and so can easily be on the phone or texting or surfing the web during work hours on networks their employers can’t monitor.
First, the case, in which a cop shows that his brain lacks the synapse energy to assist him to any measurable degree:
The Ontario, Calif., Police Department reviewed text messages sent on city-issued devices by police officers. Some of the personal texts, which a supervisor said were permitted, were sexually explicit. Lo and behold, Officer Jeff Quon and other cops got in trouble when department officials reviewed the text messages.
The privacy issue is huge, but honestly, why didn’t the cops just just use their own devices to send messages of dubious taste? Were they just too cheap to buy them? Or just too dumb to use them?
And will this case, more than anything else, teach employees to decline offers of employer-supplied cell phones and other communications gadgets if they can afford to pay for their own?
And, in this age of iPhones and cell phones and network cards, how will paranoid employers — you know, the type that put key-stroke detectors in employee work stations to track every document and message their folks sent — keep the digital chains on their work forces? Will employees eventually have to check their iPhones at the door? Or will employers realize that demanding that employees be ready to work wherever they are at any time of day also means that employees will have to be granted a bit of personal time, even when they are in the office?
