Volume 10 Issue 2

E-mail & Privacy at Work

JIM TEALBY*

Email at work is not private. The question is whether it should be.

This paper take a particular fact situation where an employer looks at the email sent and received by an employee in order to provide a defence for a possible baction by the employee for unfair dismissal and applies the regulatory framework presently existing in Australia.

The conclusions reached are as follows:

The voluntary codes (i.e. The Australian Privacy Charter, The Internet Industury Association Code of Practice, National Principles in the Fair Handling of Personal Information) do not provide adequate protection to employees in the private sector. The Telecommunications Act 1997 appears to be limited in its application to eligible carriage service providers. S7 of the Telecommunications (Interception) Act 1997, on one interpretation may be being breached by intermediary computers in a local area network and create a civil cause of action for the employee under s107A. Trespass to intangible property is beset by a number of difficulties including initially establishing personal property in the communication. Internal electronic communication policies are inevitably going to be limited in circumstances where they try to regulate messages received from an external source.

Clear legislation dealing with privacy rights in electronic communication is needed in the private sector so that employees know where they stand.