http://www.worldlawdirect.com/forum/ Criminal and civil issues related to the Internet. Web site and email issues, spam, spyware, phishing, etc. en Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:11:52 GMT vBulletin 60 http://www.worldlawdirect.com/forum/images/vbseo_skin_2.0/misc/rss.jpg http://www.worldlawdirect.com/forum/ http://www.worldlawdirect.com/forum/internet-law/31758-personal-emails-law.html Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:20:26 GMT Image: http://online.wsj.com/media/lock_CV_20091119101348.jpg Sending personal emails from your work computer is akin to sending it directly to...

Sending personal emails from your work computer is akin to sending it directly to your boss or the company’s CEO. This is the lore that’s developed throughout the years, based partly on what we’ve long heard from employment lawyers, corporate workplace experts, and companies themselves. The bottom line: Big Brother is watching.

But according to a Law Journal story by Dionne Searcey in Thursday’s WSJ, recent cases have shown that employees sometimes have more privacy rights than they might expect when it comes to personal emails. Courts in some instances are showing more consideration for employees who feel their employer has violated their privacy electronically.

“Computers are becoming recognized as being so much a part of the ongoing personal as well as professional life of employees and everyone else that courts are more sympathetic all the time to granting greater recognition to privacy,” said First Amendment guru Floyd Abrams.

In most instances when using a work device, emails of all kinds are captured on a server and can be retrieved by an employer.

“Employers are right to expect their employees when they are paid for their time at work are actually working,” said Jane McFetridge, a lawyer who handles employment issues for the Chicago office of Jackson Lewis.

Still, in some cases courts are finding that unless they have explicitly told the employee they will monitor email, they don’t have the legal right to do it — even if the email in question was a personal one sent using a work account, rather than a personal address.

In a case earlier this year in New Jersey, a worker on the brink of resigning from her job at the Loving Care Agency used a personal, password-protected Yahoo account on a work laptop to email her lawyer to hash out the details of a workplace discrimination suit she was planning to file against the agency. After the employee, Marina Stengart, left her job and filed suit, her employer extracted the emails from the hard drive of her computer laptop.

A lower court found that the emails from Stengart were company property, because the company’s internal policies had put her on sufficient notice that her emails would be viewed.

But a New Jersey appellate court disagreed, ruling in her favor in June, ordering the company to turn over the emails to Stengart and delete them from their hard drives. The court’s ruling went so far as to dissect the company’s internal policies about employee communications and decided they offered “little to suggest that an employee would not retain an expectation of privacy in such [personal] emails.”

“We reject the employer’s claimed right to rummage through and retain the employee’s emails to her attorney,” the appellate court ruling said.





]]> Internet Law WSJ_law_blog http://www.worldlawdirect.com/forum/internet-law/31758-personal-emails-law.html http://www.worldlawdirect.com/forum/internet-law/31677-being-sued-libel-slamming-somebody-twitter.html Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:18:43 GMT In a case that would have been impossible even five years ago, bad-girl rocker Courtney Love is being sued for libel by a fashion designer for... In a case that would have been impossible even five years ago, bad-girl rocker Courtney Love is being sued for libel by a fashion designer for allegedly slamming the woman on Twitter.

The suit claims that after a disagreement over what Love should pay Dawn Simorangkir for the clothes she designed, Love posted allegedly derogatory and false comments about the designer -- among them that she had a "history of dealing cocaine" -- on her now-discontinued Twitter feed.

But as technology evolves faster than the laws that govern free speech online, it's not just the famous who are finding trouble.

More...

Can the law keep up with technology? - CNN.com ]]> Internet Law forum_admin http://www.worldlawdirect.com/forum/internet-law/31677-being-sued-libel-slamming-somebody-twitter.html http://www.worldlawdirect.com/forum/internet-law/31669-spear-phishing-hackers-targeting-law-firms-page-ranking-companies.html Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:44:09 GMT Hackers are increasingly targeting law firms and public relations companies with a sophisticated e-mail scheme that breaks into their computer... Hackers are increasingly targeting law firms and public relations companies with a sophisticated e-mail scheme that breaks into their computer networks to steal sensitive data, often linked to large corporate clients doing business overseas.

In many cases, the intrusions are what cyber security experts describe as "spear phishing," attacks that come through personalized spam e-mails that can slip through common defenses and appear harmless because they have subject lines appropriate to a person's business and appear to come from a trusted source.

U.S. officials have been cautious about publicly linking cyber attacks to China.

As is often the case with cyber crime, Alan Paller, director of research at SANS Institute, a computer-security organization, said it is difficult to tell whether hackers were working on behalf of the country's government, located in that country, or simply routing computer traffic through that country.

More...

The Associated Press: FBI says hackers targeting law firms, PR companies ]]> Internet Law forum_admin http://www.worldlawdirect.com/forum/internet-law/31669-spear-phishing-hackers-targeting-law-firms-page-ranking-companies.html