A Reprehensible Man. There is no right to privacy for employee email. "The other day I spoke at a conference on unstructured data and what one does with it. As a standard practice with conferences, the feedback from the audience was forwarded to me. One of the attendees stated—“I find the implication that management will read our email to be offensive.” The implication was that I was a reprehensible person for even suggesting that corporate management should examine the communications channels of the corporation. Let’s examine the realities. First, and you don’t have to agree with me on this, the truth is that corporate management has the legal right to look at all corporate communications, including email. This is not an opinion—this is a fact.
Second, recent studies indicate that corporations are doing exactly that—looking at employee email. A recent ProofPoint study indicates that today corporations of more than 1,000 people hire monitors to look at email at the rate of 36 percent. The same survey indicates that the number is projected to reach 62 percent. This means that almost two thirds of the corporations in America are already exercising their rights to look at employee email.
As further evidence, a recent USA Today article (Tuesday, June 14, 2005, Money) cited another study done by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute whose results showed that today 55 percent of corporations retain and review employee email. . . "
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