[plug] Acceptable use policies, employee privacy legalities etc

[Patrick Coleman]

On 10/13/06, Senectus . <senectus at gmail.com> wrote:
> where does one go to find out just how many rights employee's have or
> how intrusive an employer can get when it comes to e-mail privacy and
> web surfing monitoring etc?
>
> We're writing these things up at the moment and I want to know what I
> can put in and what I can say "no you can't say that to the users"

IANAL, but I did do some research on this topic recently - it seems
that as Bernd said there is no real legislation surrounding this, so
it then apparently comes down to whether the employee can claim that
they had an "expectation of privacy" when using their employer's
resources.

As Bernd also mentioned, even though your employer installs toilets,
arranges for sewage and water connections, purchases toilet paper
(hopefully) etc. and so "should have a right to monitor how they are
used" you would expect your employer installing video cameras in the
toilet to monitor said usage to be a violation of your privacy - and
it is not unreasonable to imagine that argument being drawn to
internet or email usage.

My impression then is that if there is no internet AUP and it is not
widely known that monitoring is going on then the employee has an
"expectation of privacy" and so it somehow breaks the law to then go
and monitor the employee without notification.

If however an AUP exists, each employee has agreed to it, and you let
everyone know that data may be monitored then an employee can't then
go and reasonably claim that they had an expectation of privacy when
they used the internet, so you should be right to monitor that usage.
I could be wrong, but that was the impression I got.

The point was made several times that there doesn't appear to be much
legislation (esp. in WA), and so the issue is rather grey. The general
consensus seemed to be that as an employer you should definitely have
some sort of policy or published agreement regarding monitoring, to be
safe.

Here's the sites I found useful:

http://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Privacy/workplace.html
http://www.efa.org.au/Publish/aup.html - Sample Acceptable Usage
Policy for internet use
http://www.privacy.gov.au/internet/email - Government page on email
privacy issues

and this search:

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=employer+internet+monitoring+australia

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Patrick