| > > Why should an employee have the right to store sensitive personal data on my computer. > Because your employees are human beings and not machines. They have a life, they have needs, etc. They are free to satisfy those needs when not at work. We already have things like lunch breaks and rest break; surely we could have communications breaks were it that important. > When you give an employee a computer, it is the company property but it's the employee's computer. Which is nonsense. I cannot comprehend the sort of mindset which believes that an employee must (not may: must) be permitted to use his employer's equipment for personal ends. Must a machinist be permitted to make gears for his car at the factory? Must a soldier be permitted to take his mortar home? Must a racecar driver be permitted to borrow his car for groceries? I think it's eminently fine from a business perspective to permit incidental use of equipment (although even incidental use of IT resources does expose the firm to malware vectors it would otherwise not encounter). I can even understand others who choose to take advantage of their employers' personal-use permissions. But I personally would never be comfortable doing anything personal on a system I myself don't control. Among other things, that's why I don't want a laptop running Windows 10 or macOS. |
The corporation has no inherent right to protection. It has no inherent right to exist as a legal entity.
For most of human history they have not been a thing. They were created by society by law as a means to an end, and in doing so we gave corporations a bunch of rights that restrict our rights, by allowing corporations to e.g. continue to hold on to legal rights pasts the death of the person running it for example, and giving them special tax treatment.
As such, these corporations exists at our leisure. It's up to us to set the terms, as If you don't like those terms you're free to not set up a corporation, and instead rely on e.g. doing business as a sole trader and see how much fun that is.
The entitlement when people think that a corporation should be free to treat people however they like is astounding - society made them possible and created them, and we can shut them down if we deem they don't benefit society sufficiently.
So when society says there is an expectation of privacy of communication at work: Tough. It's our right to determine the rules for what a corporation must accept in order to be allowed to exist.
(and yes, we can go to far an mess up our economies in the process, so that we can do it does not mean that we always should do it, but in this case I fully agree with the court)