[hngiszmo]

Yeah, like 15 years ago I was on a legal seminary about how to deal with private messages at work. It's difficult. If you allow your employees to use certain means of communication for private messages, you bar yourself from reading them. If you prohibit private messages on that channel though, you have to enforce that.

As an example you could give employees 2 accounts on the company's email servers: [e-mail] and [e-mail]. If now [e-mail] sent to [e-mail] "lets grab a beer after work. Also check this link below. I guess it fixes the problem we had all week with our servers", as an employer you would have to warn and ultimately fire him over such transgressions of the rule to split private from work. The problem is that you are not allowed to read his private correspondence (grepping the backup for business problems like "where was that link again?") but you are allowed to do all this with his business mail. Not enforcing a split leads to the company legally loosing all access to all the correspondence.

[pc86]

> If you allow your employees to use certain means of communication for private messages, you bar yourself from reading them. If you prohibit private messages on that channel though, you have to enforce that.

Just curious, are you in the US? My employer's policy is essentially "Your work-provided laptop is for work. However, we recognize that you'll access personal websites and content from time to time. Don't miss deadlines because you're on Facebook or the NY Times all day." However, they explicitly retain their right (but not responsibility!) to monitor, log, and retain all traffic and activity on not only the work machines, but the work wifi (including guest wifi).

I asked about the US because I know privacy protections are much strong in the EU and I had never heard that allowing private messages bars an employer from reading them.

[6stringmerc]

Very worthwhile deliniations you've put forward - matters of policy and employment agreements, to me, aren't able to address every single instance of good or bad judgment by an employee.

I've worked with several highly regulated industries, and while data preservation is a big deal, very frequently compliance officers have said "Just don't store personal-type or non-material information like calendar meeting requests for off-site dinners" because they're simply outside the purview of what's needed to satsify the rules.

On the other hand, it was quite clearly stated that if doing filing/archiving one comes across correspondence that reflects an error of judgment (intentional or not), say relating to giving a "personal" gift to somebody above/beyond the accepted corporate policy or legal mandates (ex: local government officials), then by all means, that's in the company's interest to review and address.

There's a perfectly fine reason some sensitive conversations should take place over the phone instead of in writing (most notably "OUR IT SAYS WE'VE HAD A BREACH OMG OMG OMG"), just like there's ample reason talking about something sketchy is frequently performed over the phone. Funny creatures, us humans.