Company laptops, privacy and you | Perspectives | CNET News.com

This represents a narrow circumstance where an employee has effectively beaten a company's computer usage policy. Generally speaking, once employees sign away their privacy, the courts will side with the position of employers that electronic communications via company equipment are not private and can be used by employers.

Therefore, employees should not take from this case that all of a sudden their electronic communications on company equipment are private or privileged. By the same token, it appears that employers can strengthen their position by actually enforcing their computer usage policies on a somewhat regular basis.

In this case, email between an employee and her personal attorney were the communication in issue. The communication occurred while the employee was using a company laptop, and had agreed to a typical usage policy (ie, you have no expectation of privacy). The employee, using her personal AOL account, had corresponded with her attorney. She then deleted the relevant email messages before returning the computer to her employer. Later, the employer forensically retrieved those messages. The employee objected, contending that violated her attorney-client privilege, and the courts ultimately agreed.

Leaving aside the enforcement issue, this case raises the interesting question of what a company can legally consider to be their systems (where an employee has, by accepting the company's boilerplate usage policy, signed away their privacy). If an employee conducted personal communication, privileged or otherwise, using a web service such as Gmail, does that constitute using a company system? What if the company, rather than using a corporate WAN, simply used public infrastructure, like the internet? What happens if a company adopts a policy of allowing employees to use their own computers to do work?

Also, this seems a very North American (perhaps even just plain-old American) set of questions. Individual privacy protections are much stronger (for lack of a better term) in Europe.