Can Your Employer Read Your Personal Email After You Are No Longer Employed There?

from the questions-for-the-courts dept

While we already know that plenty of companies have systems in place to monitor your corporate email, what about your personal email accounts? And, just to make it more interesting, what about your personal email accounts after you are no longer employed at the firm? That's what's at stake in a new lawsuit, filed by a guy who was fired from a company, and later learned that they were reading his personal Yahoo email -- including messages he sent to his lawyer about responding to the firing.

Apparently, he left a computer at the office logged in to his Yahoo account, and that made it easy for the company to read his email -- and the company claims that since it's on a company computer, it's fair game. It's not exactly clear how he found out they were reading his email, however. Also, the company claims that the reason they looked at his email was because after getting fired, he used a computer (in plain view of other employees) to send himself various confidential company info. Even if that's true, it's not clear that the company should still be able to read emails in his personal account.

Filed Under: employers, legal rights, personal email