Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!wuarchive!mailrus!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Class Action Suit Against Epson Charges Email Spying Message-ID: <11594@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 1 Sep 90 06:42:00 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Organization: TELECOM Digest Lines: 263 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Special: Epson Email Syping, Part 1 of 2 TELECOM Digest Sat, 1 Sep 90 01:40:00 CDT Epson Email - Part 1 of 2 Inside This Issue: Moderator: Patrick A. Townson Re: Class Action Suit Against Epson Charges Email Spying [Many of You] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: TELECOM Moderator Subject: Re: Class Action Suit Against Epson Charges Email Spying Date: Sat, 1 Sep 1990 01:00:00 CDT Here are several responses received this week from readers of the op-ed on the Epson email case. Quotes have been severely cut back. This is part one of two parts -- yes, I told you the mail came flooding in this week! :) From: bei@halley.uucp Organization: Tandem Computers, Austin, TX If I have any opinion at all, it's a gut reaction that a company can legally monitor the phones of its workers, but ethically shouldn't unless their job involves phone contact with the public. The best justification for this comes from a friend who works at one of those big three-letter companies, when he was explaining why his company should relax its restrictions on Usenet news. He said that the company should provide space, time and access for news for the same reasons they have soda machines and a jogging track: To make a better work environment. From: "Dennis G. Rears (FSAC)" John Higdon and the TELECOM Moderator make extremely good points from the business viewpoint on the subject. The business is paying and they own everything on the computer. However, like most subjects there is more than one side: the employee, employer, and the third party ... What about the non-Epson employee who sends email to the Epson employee over the internet or their paid account on Compuserve or somewhere else? (I realize this is probably not the case but we are talking about privacy of email.) Does the company have a right to read mail from him to an epson employee? To employ the paper analogy, If I send US mail to John Doe at his Acme, Inc. place of work, does Acme have the right to open it? If you say no, Acme can say that it costs them money to distribute it internally so they have a right. Sure they can refuse it but then they could have refused the email from the remote site. At my government work site, the telephone book states that I consent to telephone monitering by using the phone. That means they have my consent but what about the person I am calling. What happens when a another person calls me; have they consented to thier call being monitored? I believe the contents of email, telephone, or paper mail should be kept private. A company should be able to prohibit personal use and enforce but never be able to read mail. In my job I send lots of mail that is 100% business related that is meant for only a few people. It would be damaging to some people and the mission itself if other than the people who it was intended for saw it. I don't want my boss or my boss'es boss to know than I am dealing with certain people or organizations. If I found out he could read my mail, I wouldn't send it and productivity would go down. Do your business search maintain the right to search your desk? Personally, I am disgusted that things like this have to go to court in the first place. Employees should respect the property rights of the employer and employers should respect the privacy rights of the employee. There are privacy concerns on email that has nothing to do if that email is personal or not. From: hkhenson@cup.portal.com Pat, re this topic, could someone post the court filings? I suspect the case is a little more complex than you make it out. While I agree with you that email/phone calls on company resources are converting the company resources to private use, spying on mail/listening to phone calls is not considered "polite" behavior, and is normally not done unless the abuses become obvious. For employeees to be in a court case with an employer is a sign of *serious* problems of trust. From: Dave Levenson Organization: Westmark, Inc., Warren, NJ, USA There is a case pending in NJ today. The state claims that the owner of a business in this state monitored telephone calls to/from his employees, while they were at work, without their permission or knowlege. He is charged with several counts of wiretap. Because he is in a heavily-regulated industry, he may be in danger of losing his right to operate his business. The press coverage does not indicate whether the monitored phone calls were considered 'personal', either by the employer or by the employees. A company spokesperson has stated that the monitoring was done by a private investigator hired by the owner to investigate possible fraud by employees. It is further claimed that the monitoring was done without the knowlege of the owner who hired the investigator. Others have stated that the employees whose phones were monitored were believed to be making arrangements to start up a new business in competition with that of their employer. It is not clear that any charges of fraud were ever brought against any current or former employees as a result of the investigation. The case has not come to trial. From: Brendan Kehoe Organization: University of Pennsylvania Uh, sorry that doesn't jive -- I've been running with the assumption that the ECPA gave me the right to *NOT* have email read on, for example, a bulletin board, unless the owner explicitly says that he/she will be doing so to protect their system. Supposedly that whole idea is the BASIS of the ecpa; if it were as you propose, then theoretically you could say that if a call placed by an AT&T subscriber were routed to a US Sprint trunk, for whatever reason (lines down, etc), then US Sprint has the legal right to do whatever they wish with the traffic they forward, since the person that "owns" that traffic isn't a Sprint subscriber? C'mon. If I'm wrong about the way I see this law being interpreted, please correct me ... (but keep the flames to email, ok?). From: Mike Godwin Organization: The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas This suggests that the right to privacy depends on ownership of property. Does a landlord have the right to plant a listening device in an apartment just because the tenant doesn't actually own it? Maybe, according to Pat, since the tenant paid for something, and maybe privacy was part of that something. But suppose I'm a housesitter or a houseguest who hasn't paid a dollar of rent, and suppose the landlord installs a listening device to hear *my* conversation. Does our Moderator *really* want to say that privacy is something one has only if one has paid for it? Suppose the Epson employees testify that they were under the impression that e-mail was private and would not be reviewed by anyone other than the recipient. Suppose they then can testify that they wrote things they would not have written if they had known Epson supervisors were spying on them. [regarding if the company should be able to see all business-related email] This, to me, seems naive. I have never had a job in which it was not true at some point that I had a business-related communication I did not want my boss to review. For example, if I wrote a note to X telling her to include charts in her presentation because the Boss is more impressed by graphics than he is by reasoned logical argument, it is quite likely that I wouldn't want the Boss to see that I had written that, even if the Boss himself knew it to be true. Nor is it always the case that such e-mail would concern something negative about supervisors. Sometimes, communication among peers, while business-related, is informal to a degree that would make it embarrassing if a boss saw it. Finally, it is a mistake, I think, to characterize corporate e-mail use as business or non-business. I cannot think of a computer system of which the following statement is not true: "Informal, 'playful' use is required if the system's formal, 'serious' use is to reach its full potential." The corporate cultures of most computer-related firms (and many other firms too) inculcate the attitude that learning how to use a system is a higher priority than limiting one's use to 'justifiable' circumstances. I wouldn't be surprised if Epson employees, prior to their fateful discovery, had thought that using e-mail for private purposes was tolerated, and perhaps even encouraged, by Epson management. But this last is a side issue. The irreducible fact, it seems to me, is that almost everyone who is given access to a corporate e-mail system is given the impression, directly or indirectly, that her communications are private. Since this is true, the employees may well have acted in reliance on that impression that their e-mail communications would be private, and may thus have been 'tricked' into making statements they otherwise would not have made. >The Epson employees deserve to lose this suit, and I hope the court >requires them to compensate their employer for his expense in >defending it. Obviously, I think this issue is a little subtler than any question of property rights. From: Colin Plumb Organization: Array Systems Computing, Inc., Toronto, Ontario, CANADA It is legitimate to complain when it costs the company money, either in phone bills or a material impact on employee work, but I believe minor use of communications facilities is more of a right than a gift. I'm using company equipment to send this message, which is only peripherally related to my work. But I know they don't object. How many repair men and delivery trucks need a daytime phone number? How do you call the hospital to ask how your child/spouse/relative's surgery went? It's silly to expect that work consumes one's undivided attention for hours on end; you have to accept the fact that you're paying people when they're not at top efficiency as well as when they are. Similarly, you have to allow some humanity overhead on communications lines. And if, say, a close friend calls me up in tears after a breakup, I expect to be able to comfort them with some reasonable expectation of privacy. No, not perfect, but anyone who hears part of it should not stick around to hear it all. I need to know more of the details, but Epson's organized eavesdropping efforts seemed excessive. (Note: I'm in the programming business, where there's a very high premium on Keeping Them Happy, so I may have different experiences than others. I've heard stories about A Certain Company that has people keeping in regular touch with girlfriends in Japan and neglects to block long distance from the front-door intercom phone. That seems just a *trifle* cavalier!) From: Jordan Kossack In general, I agree with you and John Higdon that a company has a right to know what their computers, telephones, etc. are used for. On the other hand, there are legitimate privacy concerns on the part of the employees and the persons they communicate with. In your article, you say: - - [ ... ] The right to privacy in email or on the telephone - means privacy on computers *you own or control* (i.e. lease or rent a - mailbox, etc), and on telephone lines *you pay for*. [ ... ] - Likewise with telephones: Your employer has the legal right to monitor By a direct extension of this, I should be allowed to record all telephone conversations in my house/apartment. After all, since I am paying the telephone bill, I am the only one who has a right to privacy on these phone lines. However, if I recall correctly, some states require the permission of both parties before a call can be legally recorded. Now, one may argue that the Epson employee has given his/her implicit agreement by using an Epson owned telephone, but what about the other party? Do they have any 'rights' in this situation? I don't intend this as a flame, since I agree that Epson, or any other company, should be able to control company resources. However, there are privacy concerns to be considered - primarily on the part of the non-employees who sent electronic mail to Epson employees. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V10 #612 ******************************