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IPFS News Link • Police State

EFF Urges Supreme Court to Protect Text-Message Privacy

• EFF
Public Employees Have Reasonable Expectation of Privacy in Workplace Electronic Communications Washington, D.C. - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the United States Supreme Court today to ensure that modern communications methods such as text messages retain the constitutional privacy protections applied to earlier technologies. In an amicus brief in City of Ontario v. Quon, EFF sided with a public employee who was allowed personal use of his work pager but then discovered that his employer had secretly obtained his communication records from his wireless provider. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that the city violated the Fourth Amendment, and the Supreme Court granted the city's request to review that ruling. "The Constitution fully safeguards the privacy of electronic communications sent over employer-provided equipment," said EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick. "Text messages, like phone calls or letters, are protected from warr

2 Comments in Response to

Comment by Nick Saorsa
Entered on:

When I was programmer at Sprint, there was a bout of firings that came around after management started reading the employees text messages. The phones the employees had were bought and paid for (initially and monthly fees) by the employees. The guys that got fired were stealing stuff, but it still made me incredibly uneasy that our employer could just look up our text messages on a whim. I'm not talking about a security team doing it, I'm talking about a telephone customer service supervisor looking this stuff up.

Comment by Nick Saorsa
Entered on:

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