Regulate Email Deed For Free

"Unless the employee consented to access and the employer could prove the consent, accessing or monitoring personal email, even on a company-owned IT device, in most cases would be considered an invasion of privacy in California, and there are only rare cases where this should be done without consent," said Mark Spring ...

Examples include documents, books, paper, electronic records, photographs, videos, sound recordings, databases, and other data compilations that are used for multiple purposes, or other material, regardless of physical form or characteristics.

Emails are an important part of the corporate record for all organisations. For public sector bodies they are public records and are subject to the Public Records Act, the Data Protection Act and the Freedom of Information Act. Therefore they need to be managed in a way that meets legislative requirements.

The Privacy Act doesn't prevent you from on-sharing an email containing someone's personal information, except where it would be regarded as highly offensive to do so. However, you might want to consider if the information was entrusted to you in confidence and the impact on that person of sending it on.

Under current law, an e-mail address is technically the property of the owner of the domain name to which it is directed--the @whatever in one's e-mail. This could be an employer, an Internet service provider or a free Web-based e-mail service. Philosophically, the claim of private property is tough to make.

It depends. Different copies of the same message may be records. If you take any official action related to a message, and if the message is needed for adequate and complete documentation of the action, the message would be a record in your office, regardless of whether copies are retained elsewhere.

"Unless the employee consented to access and the employer could prove the consent, accessing or monitoring personal email, even on a company-owned IT device, in most cases would be considered an invasion of privacy in California, and there are only rare cases where this should be done without consent," said Mark Spring ...