Electronic communication has recently been in the media spotlight, with high profile cases such as the federal probes into Hillary Clinton\u2019s use of personal email during her time as secretary of state. This is an area of law in which there is no uniform protocol. Online privacy is currently governed by a patchwork of overlapping federal and state laws.<\/p>\n
Sachin Pandya, a professor at the UConn School of Law and an expert on American employment law, discusses email rights and digital communication in the workplace.<\/p>\n
What are some of the most common online privacy concerns?<\/strong><\/p>\n When you worry about privacy in connection with sending or receiving an email, tweet, post, or other electronic communication, mostly you\u2019re worried that somebody else will or has read that communication without permission. For online workplace privacy, that somebody else is your employer.\u00a0Your employer already has the right to control to some extent the work you do and when you do it. We actually want employers to monitor their workers to some extent \u2013 to measure job performance and to make sure their workers don\u2019t act in a way that puts customers, co-employees, or even the employer\u2019s reputation at risk.\u00a0But we don\u2019t want employers to use their power to control in general what you say and do and with whom. Since most of us work for someone else, the risk is that we lose, among other things, a robust civil society.\u00a0That\u2019s in part why laws on workplace privacy matter, both online and in the physical world.<\/p>\n How do we calibrate the law to best protect both worker privacy and employer monitoring for legitimate ends?<\/strong><\/p>\n There is no single source of law for online workplace privacy. Actually, a lot of the relevant law arose well before electronic communication existed or became ubiquitous. Many state laws prohibit anyone \u2013 including a private employer \u2013 from intentionally intruding upon a person\u2019s \u201cseclusion\u201d in a way that\u2019s highly offensive to a reasonable person.\u00a0That covers not only the employer who videotapes the company bathroom, but also the one who covertly reads the text messages on your own personal smartphone.\u00a0As you might guess, what counts as \u201chighly offensive\u201d varies a lot by the facts of a particular case. It also changes over time with what judges take to be society\u2019s views of what should count as private.\u00a0There are, to be sure, various federal and state statutes that cover electronic communications generally, but these laws were mostly aimed at computer hackers.\u00a0Still, judges have applied these laws in cases where an employer or employee intercepted or accessed electronic communications without the other\u2019s permission.\u00a0Only rather recently have legislatures passed laws with workplace online privacy directly in mind.<\/p>\n Are personal email accounts on third-party servers protected from employer searches, even if accessed on a workplace computer?<\/strong><\/p>\n Mostly yes. If you use your employer\u2019s computer to access your private, password-protected email on the server of a third-party service provider, the Stored Communications Act bans your employer from deliberately accessing that email without your permission. By contrast, you should expect a lot less privacy for communications via your employer\u2019s email system, or at least as much or as little privacy as the company\u2019s email policy provides.<\/p>\n But what if your employer asks you for permission to access your personal email or Facebook accounts?\u00a0If you expressly authorize access for your employer, then the Stored Communications Act\u2019s ban doesn\u2019t apply. Some state legislatures have taken the lead and banned employers from asking or requiring an employee to give them access to their personal email or social media accounts.\u00a0By mid-April this year, 22 state legislatures had introduced or considered this kind of legislation.<\/p>\n Can employers require that employees grant them access to their social media accounts? Can employees be legally fired because of what they post on social media?<\/strong><\/p>\n It depends. Employer motives in that situation can vary.\u00a0Maybe what you posted really harmed the company\u2019s reputation.\u00a0Or maybe it contradicts what you said in an internal investigation of alleged employee misconduct.\u00a0Or maybe they just disagree with the viewpoint you express. The legal protections you have as an employee vary with the source of law.\u00a0The First Amendment\u2019s Free Speech Clause restricts what government employers can do when an employee engages in protected \u201cspeech\u201d \u2013 including online posts and emails. In contrast, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) \u2013 which applies to private employers \u2013 protects you if what you did counts as a \u201cconcerted activity\u201d for the purpose of \u201cmutual aid or protection.\u201d Think for example about an email that complained about company policy and suggested what workers at the company could do about it. What many people don\u2019t realize is that the NLRA protects non-unionized employees as well as those in a labor union.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sachin Pandya of UConn Law discusses workplace privacy and the rights of employers and employees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":101633,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1857],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[46],"class_list":["post-101591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-law"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-23 11:55:18","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101591"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101634,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101591\/revisions\/101634"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/101633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101591"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=101591"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=101591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}