Email Insecurity
The case reported by Professor Ross Runkel issued by a New Jersey appellate court, Stengart v Loving Care Agency, held that privileged communication by the former employee with her attorney through her employer’s computer retained its privilege.
The case was interesting because the employee made the same mistake many people make. The employee was using a web based password protected email account believing that no trace of the email on the outside website was being left on the computer owned by the employer. That was untrue. Because the employee was viewing web email through the browser on the employer’s computer, the computer captured a picture of every image the employee saw, thus preserving it for the employer’s computer analyst to retrieve.
The moral of the story: do not use an employer’s computer for anything you want to remain private. Go outside of the employer’s hardware.
Most employers are not set up to retrieve or view web images viewed by the employee, but that does not mean a computer expert cannot retrieve the images from the computer when desired. Just because compliance systems are not set up to see every image the employee can see, like web based email, does not mean the email, once viewed on the employer’s computer, cannot be viewed by a computer analyst.
