Private Email On Corporate Computers?
April 2nd, 2010 by ComputerBob
Back in the early 1990s, I worked as a computer consultant on a 20,000-employee campus of a multinational corporation in the Frostbite State.
I wore a shirt and tie to work every day, and on meeting days, I also wore a sports jacket, but in the 3+ years that I worked there, I was the only male employee (except for one native American) who had a pony tail. When you’re the only man with a pony tail in very stodgy corporate setting, everyone assumes that you must really know your stuff.
Anyway, at one point, that corporation announced that its IT policies included its right to read, review, copy, transmit, save, etc. every email message that went through its mail servers, whether they were sent to or from its corporate email accounts or through employees’ private email accounts.
Don’t ask how I know, but believe me, they had people in cubicles who really did read them, looking for evidence of corporate espionage or whatever else they were curious about.
I don’t know if that corporation has changed its IT policy since then or not, but if it hasn’t, it may want to do it before someone takes a big bite out of its big corporate butt, now that the New Jersey Supreme Court has issued a ruling on the privacy of personal emails on corporate computers.
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April 4th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Leaving the privacy issue for now … why oh why would anyone have personal email on a corporate account?
I know folks who have ALL their mail sent to a corporate address … maybe they are not smart enough to have a gmail or hotmail or whatever-free-mail-you-like account. Maybe they can’t access their own ISP’s mail server via a web interface?
The really amazing part is that these folks have jobs at all (and expect privacy). My feeling is pretty simple: if you don’t want your boss (and co-workers) to see something, don’t take it to work. But, I’m probably out of touch and old fashioned.
April 6th, 2010 at 5:52 pm
Bob,
I work at a university, so I don’t know much about corporate nets, but…
I think some places block web-based email. And the network perimeter is configured to block connections to outside SMTP servers, so people would need to relay their email thru the corporate mail server. I think that was the issue with this NJ case, the company allowed the mail to flow thru the company server, and logged it.
On the one hand, I can see that is the corporate network and they own the packets. On the other hand, it seems poor treatment of the employee to say it is OK to use the corporate network for this purpose, and then snoop on the traffic.
One could imagine a poor cubicle drone, stuck deep indoors out of cell phone range. Maybe they want to keep tab on when the kids get home from school. And their only option is using the company mail server?