The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that supervisors in the workplace can read through worker’s text messages if they suspect that work rules are being contravened. This ruling overturns the ruling in favour of Police Sergeant Jeff Quon that was previously passed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Police Sergeant Quon had sued the police chief and city of Ontario in California after a transcript had been obtained and read of the messages he had sent from a text pager provided by the police department. The transcript contained thousands of messages, some of them sexually explicit, sent to his wife and a girlfriend. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled in his favour under the Fourth Amendment which bans ‘unreasonable searches’, stating that he had good reason to believe that his personal messages would be considered private.
The Supreme Court ruled that although “the search did reveal intimate details of Quon's life does not make it unreasonable”, stating that he could have reasonably expected only limited privacy when using a government-provided text messaging device within government departments. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who handed down the new ruling, did acknowledge that the ruling was very narrow and could not apply to all disputes that arise from using computers and cellular phones in the workplace.
Brett Venter
