Jeffery Smith
1. The trial court found that Stengart did not have a legitimate expectation of privacy when sending personal emails through the company’s laptop. The appellate court and the Supreme Court disagreed. Discuss the reasoning that the higher courts had in reversing the trial court.
Stengart would have had an impression that all her information was private and also not accessible to the company. Companies ought to be more transparent or open when issuing the user agreements. Also, there needs to be a general comprehension of what information belongs to the enterprise and what information tends to be private.
This case tends to present the novel questions concerning the extent to which the employee may anticipate the confidentiality and privacy in the individual e-mail with her lawyer or attorney that she accessed on the computer that belonged to her company. Stengart utilized her organization-issued laptop to send e-mails to her attorney via her individual, password- protected, and web-based email account. Later, she did file an employment discrimination court case against her boss, Loving Care Agency, Inc.
2. What effect would this decision have on a company when thinking about forming company policy regarding personal communication?
Organizations are starting to utilize technology to continuously monitor their workers’ activities in all sorts of habits or ways to respond to issues of waste, fraud, and abuse, reorganizing a productive work culture some companies measure keystrokes and utilize other programs to update supervisors when employees are idle more than ten minutes (Clearinghouse, 2016). Other techniques utilized are logging keywords so as to flag websites that workers visit while at work as well as blocking sites such as Facebook and YouTube since they aren’t related to work.
Most companies implement the computer user agreements for workers requiring computer access. Moreover, the situation concerning Stengart plus computer usages privacy didn’t address workplace monitoring and confidentiality issue.
The fact that Stengart did have an anticipation of confidentiality in the emails exchanged with her attorney doesn’t imply that companies cannot monitor the utilization of their computers. Organizations can implement some legal policies that relate to the utilization of computers to shield the reputation, property, as well as a company’s productivity to guarantee there is conformity with legal business policies. Besides, employers should enact such policies and discipline workers and when it is suitable, fire them for breaching the workplace set of laws.
3. Would a state antispam statute that specifically prohibited pornographic, obscene, terroristic and fraudulent emailing withstand constitutional scrutiny? Why or why not?
A state anti-spam statute would withstand the constitutional scrutiny. This is due to the fact that as a society, many people tend to concur that this content, in case not illegal, isn’t professional or qualified in scope and it disrupts the workplace ethics or moral codes.
In 2003, President Bush signed into law CAN-SPAM act which doesn’t restrict the sending of unsolicited commercial emails, although it provides some rules and regulation governing commercial email communications.
4. Is spam really so bad? Why can a business lawfully send unsolicited traditional mail, or make unsolicited phone calls (as long as there is no violation of a no-call list) but spamming violates the law?
Spam is so bad. Unsolicited email spam is annoying and it is a potential threat or risk to computer systems and networks. The keyword that makes spams a threat is “unsolicited” since the average computer users might not be outfitted or equipped with the know-how to safeguard their networks or clients. It is significant that Cyber laws enact and prohibit dissemination of obscene, pornographic, fraudulent, and terroristic email spam (Chander, 2012).
References
Chander, H. (2012). Cyber laws and IT protection. PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd..
Clearinghouse, P. R. (2016). Workplace privacy and employee monitoring. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.