Employee E-Mails, IMs Must Be Tracked

[Alexis696969]

http://www.wgal.com/news/10439274/detail.html


The federal rules have been approved from the Supreme Court in the US ,this will take effect this Friday

plus digital photos of work sites on employee cell phones and information on removable memory cards


This sounds very expensive for !!!!!

 

[svtcobra]

This has been going on even before this bill has been put in place, now company have a legal way to get you're ass fired.

Allot of people think that their emails and phone conversations are not recorded but in reality it is stored in their companies offline database which only a select people have access to. I work with some major corps and you would be amazed what they know about you and what you're doing everyday, I've seen it first hand. Even though they say the don't do it, 90% of the time they are. Yeah yeah there are laws but to protect the company's secrets they do it for the company best interest.

 

[jaycam]

Tis true I haved worked back office IT in over a dozen major Canadian firms. Every email you type is stored even if you delete it right after you send it, It can be recovered from your sent items. Typicaly exchange servers are backed up every single day, and mothly backups are kept for years sometimes for compliance reasons.

So every email you every sends from your work its kept at your bosses fingertips for years.

Also who owns "your" email. Canadian law is it belongs to your company, its there mail servers there domaian and there PC's there bandwidth. Long story short, get a gmail account and surf from home. However Google mail will turn your mail over to without a warrant, but that should not get you fired

 

[fuji]

Depends where you work. If you work for a financial company, especially a brokerage, I think they are required by law to keep your emails on file for 7 years for regulatory reasons, and to have them ready and waiting to hand over to a SEC/OSFI/whatever auditor on demand.

However if you work for an unregulated company they may prefer NOT to keep the stuff around any longer than they have to. If a company has a policy of routiney deleting emails, then anything they routinely delete is not available for lawyers to "discover" via discovery motions, subpeonas, etc., and since it was deleted as part of a routine policy it's not an illegal act.

Of course the moment there's an ACTUAL lawsuit they have to stop doing that, because once they are aware of a lawsuit, deleting it would be destruction of evidence--but anything they deleted *routinely* PRIOR to the lawsuit is simply unavailable for the adversary to use againt them. (Going and shredding stuff because you realize you are about to be hit by a lawsuit is illegal--it has to be a routine policy predating any hint of legal action to survive in court.)

The company I work for now has an outright policy of not keeping emails around for this reason. They purposefully do not keep backups around longer than about a day, and they encourage employees to delete emails they no longer need. One I worked for previously had an outright policy of deleting ANY email that was older than a month out of your exchange folder, for the same reason--to ensure there was nothing available for anyone to discover should they ever face a lawsuit.