Think twice before you send email from your email account at work.  Wired magazine is reporting that more than a third of all large companies in the U.S. and Britain employ staff or information technology to read employee’s outgoing email.  The primary purpose of monitoring employee email is to guard against leaks of confidential customer, partner, and competitive information. Most companies are far less worried about tracking down love letters to a mistress or email chain letters.

Nearly 1 in 3 companies also reported firing employees in the last 12 months for violation of the company’s email policy.

Do you have a right to privacy while using your company email?   In almost all cases, you do not.  You are using the resources of your employer: computers, networks, software, etc.  It all belongs to the company.

Instant messaging is also very prevalent in the workplace, and the same applies here.   Due to increasing regulation and to protect company data and intellectual property, most large firms have already deployed software that monitors and archives all instant message conversations.

Think twice about what you send using all forms of company communication systems.   A former colleague of mine sent emails with questionable content to his friends outside the company for an extended period of time.   As a result of a lawsuit against the firm, totally unrelated to my colleague, his email archives were subpoenaed, exposing all of his transgressions (both work and person).

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Commentary

  1. Daniel wrote on 04. Jun 2006

    This is scary. Thanks for the reminder. I work for a big company, and sometimes it is easy to forget that what I write at work is mostly likely being monitored.

  2. candlelover wrote on 04. Jun 2006

    Everything that I write should be private it is mine, and my company has no business reading it!

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