Sunday, June 20, 2010



SCOTUS: Texting not private

We read:
"The Supreme Court said Thursday a California police officer’s privacy was not breached when his superiors read transcripts of hundreds of his text messages to determine whether the Ontario Police Department was providing an adequate number of monthly pager texts.

The SWAT officer, Jeff Quon, was exceeding the limit for months, and his superiors wanted to know why. Quon was originally paying the extra fees out of his own pocket.

He sued after the inquiry, alleging his privacy was violated. Many of the text messages were sexually explicit. … The decision reversed the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that ruled that the search was ‘legitimate’ but ‘not reasonable in scope.’”

Source

This will certainly inhibit what some people say via texts

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Texting is the new crack, along with tweeting, twitting, twatting, and all the other moronic things people are doing to get attention. They put their private lives out in public, and when it goes terribily wrong, as it usually does, they whine about their privacy. These are public domains, and as such, no one has the right to an expectation of privacy.

Anonymous said...

Well actually, this is more of a case of using employer provided equipment and whether or not you have an expectation of privacy, even if you pay for any charges.

What the court was saying that because cell phones are easily accessible, the officer could have purchased his own cell phone (or used his own if he already had one) rather than use employer equipment for personal use.

So if you have a company issued laptop and you use something like Yahoo IM or Skype or something, then the company has every right to read all of your text messages and use them accordingly.

This isn't so much about personal cell phones and equipment.

Anonymous said...

Employees are in effect slaves. If you want to be really free you have to get financial freedom one way or another.

Anonymous said...

"Texting is the new crack, along with tweeting, twitting, twatting, and all the other moronic things people are doing to get attention."

I guess I'm safe for now Anon.

I'm a little behind the curve for the latest must have, ego boosting form of networking (I call bullsh*tting).

I just bought me a Citizen's Band radio for my 1968 GMC Jimmy!

Anonymous said...

Using your employers gear to do personal stuff is pretty stupid. If your corp e-mail isn't private, and your corp phone traffic isn't private, how stupid do you have to be to think your employer supplied phones txt messaging would be? Espically when (as this cop did) you go over the contract limit thereby making sure they have some reason to pay attention to your abuse of the equipment.

Here's a thought, use YOUR phone for YOUR buisness. Leave the taxpayers phone for the POLICE buisness. ID10t.