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U.S. Court Affirms Employer's Right to Read Employees' Email

U.S. law gives employees few protections against employer surveillance of their workplace communications. Even without express employee consent, U.S. employers generally may listen to workplace telephone conversations, read messages sent to and from corporate email accounts, and record and disclose the contents of employee communications. Employees that bring legal challenges to these practices rarely succeed in U.S. courts. The recent decision of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Fraser v. Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company, which upholds an employer's reading of an employee's electronic mail email ("email") messages, typifies the obstacles that complaining employees face under U.S. law. 1

Background of the Fraser Decision: The Electronic Communications Privacy Act ("ECPA")

In the United States, monitoring of employee communications is governed primarily by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 ("ECPA"). 2 The ECPA is divided broadly into restrictions on two kinds of activity: (1) interceptions, which are acquisitions of communications in real time (e.g., while the parties to a conversation are speaking or while an email is in process of transmission); and (2) unauthorized access to communications after they have been placed in electronic storage. ...

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