Getting the Message : E-Mail is fast and efficient. But it isn’t always private--and that can mean big trouble for users.
Electronic mail allows workers to communicate efficiently, share jokes, make lunch plans.
And, potentially, get into big trouble.
As the technology, also known as e-mail, continues its decade-long march into American business, it tests our etiquette and, more recently, raises sobering questions about workplace privacy vs. accountability.
The millions of people who use electronic mail--three-quarters of large companies use it, by one estimate--have mostly learned the system by trial and error. Some electronic errors are inconsequential: Careful punctuation and spelling, for example, brand you a novice. Others are colossal, such as sending a nasty message about your boss to your boss.
Ask around and the tales can sound like an electronic soap opera. A woman sends a message to her boyfriend saying “Hello, sexy,” but misspells his name by one letter and elates someone else instead. Sending a message to the wrong person happens to almost everyone at least once, says Sara Kiesler, professor of social sciences and social psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who studies electronic mail users.
Or office politics can reveal themselves in glowing color. For example, Kiesler recalled a group of scientists who were asked to find a new editor for their association’s journal. They posted an electronic notice, and the astonished incumbent editor saw it and campaigned against it on-screen. Thousands eventually became involved, sending messages and altering a process that ordinarily would have happened in a back room, says Kiesler, co-author with Lee Sproull of a new book, “Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization.”
Other than common sense, few user guidelines exist. “It’s a field where a lot more publicity is needed,” says Robert H. Anderson, who co-authored a 1985 report for the RAND corporation in Santa Monica, “Toward an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail.”
His two most important bits of advice?
* Be careful about expressing emotion in a message.
“If you attempt humor or irony or if you’re angry and it shows, those (messages) are tremendously easy to be misinterpreted by the other party,” he says, because the receiver can’t see a grin or hear a chuckle.
* Assume messages are forever.
“It seems very transitory,” Anderson says, but “it lives on in somebody’s archives.” Messages could be subpoenaed or printed on company letterhead, making them appear much more official than ever intended.
Some systems have built-in symbols--smiles, frowns, hearts--to add a personal touch. Or senders can create their own.
Anderson says every such symbol should be used: “It really is a desperately needed cue to understand the human nature behind the message.”
A generally negative cue, which he calls dangerous, is to use all capital letters--the equivalent of a shout.
Kiesler suggests envisioning e-mail conversations as taking place at a company retreat, with people wearing casual clothes, lolling around a pool and, perhaps, overhearing. She also advises remembering that people on the receiving end have feelings.
“You’re not talking to a computer, to a faceless audience. They all have faces out there,” Kiesler says.
A common path to electronic embarrassment is replying by mistake not just to the person who sent the mass message, but to everyone who got the original message, which could be thousands. Many systems have defaults that encourage such a problem, Anderson says.
One manager, for example, requested Social Security numbers from a large number of employees; many sent their numbers to the manager and inadvertently to the “huge list of relative strangers,” recalls RAND’s Tora Bikson.
And one job-seeker mistakenly sent his resume and a letter to a 1,000-person mailing list rather than to the hiring manager, divulging salary demands and why he wanted the job. “His private life was laid out for everybody to see,” says Kiesler.
E-mail has even spawned its own vocabulary. Message has somehow become a verb; receiving messages without acknowledging them is to “lurk”; sending scorching messages without thinking is to “flame.”
“The fact that you can respond to something right away leads people to respond with their first gut reaction, which may not be the most diplomatic,” says Sherburne, whose company sells the 11-year-old SprintMail, the oldest public e-mail system in the United States. “Far and away, that’s the biggest problem we see.” (He suggests, half-kiddingly, that people wait an hour, as they do when swimming after eating.)
Some Los Angeles Police Department officers have learned more than they ever wanted to know about the permanence of their squad-car messages. The Christopher Commission, studying the department in the wake of the Rodney King beating, deemed about 700 messages improper and apparently sexist or racist. Dozens of officers are being interviewed to defend their messages. (Some messages have innocent explanations, like those sent between husband and wife, for example.)
“The main lesson is that any communication going on using modern, new, relatively unexplored communication technology had better be thought about a lot more carefully than has been done to date,” Anderson says. “Unfortunately, perhaps more oversight and monitoring need to be done so that things don’t get out of hand.”
The Police Department example also highlights the tension between workplace privacy and accountability.
“The juxtaposition of that LAPD situation and the public’s right to know what was on the tapes with the issue of how to have a secure workplace illustrates how complex the issue is,” says Michael F. Cavanagh, executive director of the Electronic Mail Assn. in Arlington, Va.
“This broadens the set of issues we need to consider,” says Eric Roberts, professor of computer science at Stanford University and president of the 3,000-member Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. (The group, formed to address the danger of accidental nuclear warfare set off by computers, addresses mostly civil liberties issues today.)
“It’s an example of rights in conflict. That is always a sensitive area of both law and ethics.”
One important lesson, observers say, is that companies need explicit policies about whether messages are private. The federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 protects messages from eavesdropping by parties outside an organization but doesn’t cover employer-employee relationships.
“Any thoughtful manager ought to have wrestled with this question” in light of the Christopher Commission report, Anderson says. “It’s time to come to a decision and formulate a policy, because you can really get burned with these systems.
“I shudder at the number of companies that are going to be sued on the basis of things casually said in messages.”
Several companies already have been.
Two lawsuits are pending against Torrance-based Epson America for invasion of privacy. One plaintiff is a former e-mail manager who says she was fired for trying to stop other managers from reading messages between employees. The second is a class-action suit on behalf of everyone whose messages were allegedly read.
Noel Shipman, who represents plaintiffs in both suits, says they are seeking $3,000 for each message allegedly read, a total of more than $7 million. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled in June that California’s wiretapping statute does not cover e-mail, according to Michael Lindsay, Epson’s attorney. But the suits are continuing under state privacy statutes.
Shipman also represents two former employees who sued Nissan Motor Corp. USA of Carson in January, alleging that a manager read their e-mail without their knowledge and that they were fired after they filed a grievance about it.
The problem is easy to solve, Shipman says: “Don’t monitor, or tell your employees ahead of time” that messages will be monitored.
One possible guide, RAND’s Bikson offers, is considering e-mail private unless there’s some reason to treat it otherwise.
But simply telling people what to say--or not to say--probably would do no good.
It would be “shortsighted,” says Cavanagh of the Electronic Mail Assn., “if you only say, ‘Please be sure not to say anything offensive on e-mail.’ ”
In fact, such a warning was issued at the Police Department several years ago. The Times reported in 1988 that some officers had been repeatedly warned at roll call against sending racially and sexually offensive messages, and one officer was suspended briefly for doing so.
“We warned people they couldn’t get away with this the way they sometimes could on the car radios because there are records of the messages in the computers, and they can be traced to the senders,” retired police captain Diane Harber was quoted then as saying.
Now, after testifying before the Christopher Commission, Harber says that officers viewed messages as if they were spoken and gone. Still, she says people need some sort of conversational outlet during the workday: “I think it’s very unhealthy for people not to express themselves in human terms with one another.”
Bikson says it’s too soon for businesses to respond to the Police Department message uproar.
“I think we haven’t decided what the status of e-mail is,” she says.
She cites two very different company policies. One United Nations organization considers in-house e-mail to be as private as a phone call, but any e-mail sent outside is treated as organization property. One private-sector company, however, does the opposite: Anything in-house is company property; anything outside is private.
Without explicit company edicts or conclusions about abstract privacy questions, Bikson urges users to turn to that old standby--common sense:
“Without stifling the spontaneity and flexibility of the medium, it’s a good idea to have a look at what you’ve said and ask yourself how you’d feel if it were forwarded to all sorts of people.”
