Supreme Court to rule on employee privacy.

• Position: PRIVACY

All employees who e-mail or text using a company-owned device or system will want to pay close attention to how the U.S. Supreme Court rules in the landmark case Ontario v. Quon.

The court will review the case this spring and determine whether government employees specifically have a reasonable expectation of privacy when e-mailing or texting using company-owned systems. However, the ruling is also expected to affect private sector employees and employers' formal and informal policies regarding electronic communications.

At issue is whether the Ontario (Calif.) Police Department violated an officer's constitutional right to privacy when it reviewed personal text messages sent and received on a government-issued pager. When the department issued pagers to officers, it had a formal policy covering computer, Internet, and e-mail usage stating the systems were for official use only. The policy allowed for "light personal communications" but warned employees should have no expectation of privacy. There was no specific policy for text messaging, however.

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Each pager user was given a monthly limit of 25,000 text characters. Under an informal policy put in place by a police lieutenant, as reported by The Washington Post, officers who exceeded the limit were required to pay overage charges if they did not want their pager to be audited. Sgt. Jeff Quon and others regularly exceeded the limit and paid the charges.

When the department decided to review pager usage to determine whether to increase the character limit, it discovered only 57 of more than 450 messages sent and received by Quon involved police business. Many of the others were sexually explicit...