South Carolina Business Law Blog

Good article in the National Law Journal by Marcia Coyle about the City of Ontario, Calif. v. Quon case that the Supreme Court will hear on Monday. SCOTUSblog also has a detailed analysis of the case. At issue is whether a member of the Ontario SWAT team had a Fourth Amendment "reasonable expectation of privacy" in text messages transmitted on his SWAT pager, and whether the senders of messages to the SWAT pager had their own reasonable expectation that the City of Ontario would not review their messages.

A decision from the New Jersey Supreme Court is required reading for any company with a policy setting out acceptable email and online use for its employees. In Stengart v. Loving Care , the NJ Supreme Court addressed how much privacy and confidentiality an employee could expect when she exchanges personal emails with her attorney via a password-protected, web-based email account accessed on a company computer. Loving Care provided Stengart with a laptop to use for company business, from which she had access to the Internet through Loving Care's computer server. Stengart used the laptop to access a personal, password-protected Yahoo email account on Yahoo's website, by which she communicated with her attorney about her work situation. Stengart was unware that the computer's browser software automatically saved a copy of each webpage Stengart viewed-- including each email message she exchanged with her attorney-- on the computer's hard drive. Loving Care had a fo