‘Private’ Notes on E-Mail Might Be in Mixed Company
Ever send private notes on company e-mail, or lace an e-mail with sexual asides? Then consider this cautionary tale, passed along to Orange County executives at a recent Latham & Watkins employment law seminar in Costa Mesa: There in the Los Angeles meeting room stood a red-faced Nissan Motor Corp. USA official, halted midway through an e-mail training session. There before her sat a roomful of snickering Nissan and Infiniti dealers. And there on her display screen, selected at random from a backup system, was a Nissan worker’s very personal e-mail, filled with sexually graphic language.
The Carson company subsequently found stacks of similar stuff in the worker’s electronic missives, including X-rated stories she composed with a second worker. Both women had been in trouble before for various job problems and each had signed statements acknowledging that Nissan’s e-mail system was for business only.
One woman soon quit, the other was fired, and both sued Nissan for wrongful termination, accusing the company of breaking state wiretapping and eavesdropping laws. They claimed they had a reasonable expectation of privacy in their e-mail, in part because they used passwords to sign on to the system.
But Nissan argued that privacy wasn’t to be expected. Its all-business policy for computers was clear and possession of a password didn’t equal a license for private use, the company said.
A trial judge in Torrance Superior Court agreed, tossing out the suit, a decision upheld by a state appeals panel in Los Angeles in 1994.
Andrew M. Paley, a Latham lawyer who represented Nissan, said the message is clear: Employees should treat e-mail like a memo that can be retrieved from the files, not like a phone call, which disappears when the caller hangs up.
And employers should make clear, Paley said, that they can and will police e-mail when business reasons demand.
*
E. Scott Reckard covers workplace issues for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-7407 and at scott.reckard@latimes.com.
