Email Privacy (Australia)

[Lowie]

Looks like any hope of privacy at work could be over here in Australia.

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegrap...014099,00.html

Basically, for anti terrorism measures, your employer may be allowed to snoop on your private and work emails, without any need for a warrant.

Seems to me like a very easy way for an employer to gather dismissal evidence on an employee.

Thoughts?

[streaker69]

Re: Email Privacy (Australia)

Looks like any hope of privacy at work could be over here in Australia.

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegrap...014099,00.html

Basically, for anti terrorism measures, your employer may be allowed to snoop on your private and work emails, without any need for a warrant.

Seems to me like a very easy way for an employer to gather dismissal evidence on an employee.

Thoughts?

Why would you expect to have any expectation of privacy related to your company email?

You do not own that particular email account, it is provided to you by your employer for work related things. It is perfectly within the rights of the company to monitor what they own.

Now if you're checking your personal email at work, they may or may not have the right to monitor/prohibit such activity. As doing so could cause issues as you're effectively bypassing normal email controls that could have been put in place by the Network Admin.

[0x58]

Re: Email Privacy (Australia)

If you never open private email from within the company and keep it to yourself, there where it is private, how are they supposed to gain access to snoop on you?

Corporate email has been snooped on for years, to make sure data is not leaving the building which should not be leaving the building, I have never really expected privacy in a corporate establishment, and with all the various requirements that companies have to follow (PCI, SOX, HIPAA) depending on the field they are in, it is almost guaranteed they are following employee emailing closely.

Also, you have succesfully taken the entire article out of context, and made it sound like all companies in Australia will be allowed to do this. Which is not true, the article mentions:

The Federal Government is developing new counter-terrorism measures which include changes to the Telecommunications Act that would allow companies providing services critical to the economy to read workers' emails.

Emphasis added by me. The article states two examples which make a lot of sense, the banking system and the electric system. I don't see anything wrong with updating laws to include newer technologies than what was available at the time the laws were written.

[Lowie]

Re: Email Privacy (Australia)

If you never open private email from within the company and keep it to yourself, there where it is private, how are they supposed to gain access to snoop on you?

Corporate email has been snooped on for years, to make sure data is not leaving the building which should not be leaving the building, I have never really expected privacy in a corporate establishment, and with all the various requirements that companies have to follow (PCI, SOX, HIPAA) depending on the field they are in, it is almost guaranteed they are following employee emailing closely.

Also, you have succesfully taken the entire article out of context, and made it sound like all companies in Australia will be allowed to do this. Which is not true, the article mentions:
.

Sorry about the inadequate quote. It wasn't intended. And I never use personal email or sites while at work, that's a given. But a lot of people do, as they don't understand how easily the info is tracked. I know companies do check what content is being sent from or received to there network. I understand this, especially for infrastructure companies. But what worries me is that the new laws open up the possibility for a company to use the information gained by these methods to discipline or dismiss an employee, information that has no security related issue, but has been accumulated under this guise.

[0x58]

Re: Email Privacy (Australia)

If you are checking your private email at work, they can already get the information under the guise that you are using company resources to do private stuff, and hence the company is allowed to know what are you are up to.

It does not have the privacy implications you think it has. I as a company could have it in my contract that at any time I am allowed to have the machine capture every movement on the screen and send screen-shots at 1 second intervals to a central server. This is entirely legal, and allows the same information to easily be found out.

[streaker69]

Re: Email Privacy (Australia)

Sorry about the inadequate quote. It wasn't intended. And I never use personal email or sites while at work, that's a given. But a lot of people do, as they don't understand how easily the info is tracked. I know companies do check what content is being sent from or received to there network. I understand this, especially for infrastructure companies. But what worries me is that the new laws open up the possibility for a company to use the information gained by these methods to discipline or dismiss an employee, information that has no security related issue, but has been accumulated under this guise.

The computer usage policy at my place actually has this defined. Failure to abide by the computer usage policy most certainly may end up in the person's dismissal.

As a matter of fact, we have a FnG that is about to be bitchslapped again for failing to abide by the policy.

[Lowie]

Re: Email Privacy (Australia)

The computer usage policy at my place actually has this defined. Failure to abide by the computer usage policy most certainly may end up in the person's dismissal.

As a matter of fact, we have a FnG that is about to be bitchslapped again for failing to abide by the policy.

All sounds fair to me. I just worry for the unsuspecting out there.

Australia has been pretty good as far as right to privacy aspects go. It's a very fine line to legislate on, and I guess misuse and abuse of the laws goes both ways.

[streaker69]

Re: Email Privacy (Australia)

All sounds fair to me. I just worry for the unsuspecting out there.

Australia has been pretty good as far as right to privacy aspects go. It's a very fine line to legislate on, and I guess misuse and abuse of the laws goes both ways.

If they're unsuspecting, then it's their own fault. I've never been in a company where the usage policy was a secret. It's normally very clearly defined in the employee handbook. A lot of companies make employees sign the policy at least once a year, or whenever the policy has changed.

I see the main problem as employees think that they won't get caught, because most of them are ignorant of how easily they can be tracked.

[Suriyawong]

Re: Email Privacy (Australia)

They did yearly updates in their files at my High School as well. Every year we had to sign a computer agreement, else our account would be disabled after a couple of weeks or something. So, if a High School does it, I would imagine that it's fairly common in companies as well. Or at least, it probably should be...