Tag Archives: Stored Communications Act

It’s pretty clear that using your employer’s email system for personal business is not a good idea and can get your fired; it could also send you to jail, if your emails reveal a crime. Employees have very little to no expectation of privacy in emails received through employer accounts. An employee at Aeropostale, the clothing company, found out that not only can his employer use a personal email to fire him, but the government can also use it against …

It’s hard to imagine getting fired based on text messages or videos on your own personal cell phone, but according to one federal appeals court, it’s absolutely legal – at least under one federal law designed to protect electronic transmissions. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Dec. 12 said the Stored Communications Act (SCA) did not protect a city employee from her employer using the contents of her cell phone to fire her.    Phone Taken by Snooping …

If you thought your Gmail or Yahoo! mail accounts were safe from prying eyes, think again. The illusion of privacy in cyberspace took yet another hit on Oct. 10 when the South Carolina Supreme Court declared, in effect, that reading someone else’s Yahoo! emails doesn’t violate federal law. The Stored Communications Act is an archaic 1986 federal law that courts are still trying to apply to technologies that were never even imagined when the law was drafted. Judges are forced …

NEWS UPDATE: See the story and video at Twitter Caves and Hands Over Protester’s Tweets to Avoid Fines. In what’s being called a case of first impression, a judge in Manhattan ruled on July 2 that Twitter must turn over some of the deleted Tweets of a user who was arrested in October 2011 during an Occupy Wall Street demonstration. Prosecutors believe that Malcolm Harris was tweeting about an issue he is trying to use in his defense and that his …

How private are your posts on Facebook and your tweets on Twitter? If you think the answer depends only on how you configure your privacy or security settings for your accounts, you might be in for a rude awakening – at least if you’re ever involved in a court case. Two recent cases illustrate that if you step into a courthouse – whether intentionally, as a plaintiff in a civil suit, or not so intentionally as a defendant or even …