Appeals Court Limits Text Message Release

A federal appeals court has ruled that text-type messages generated by employees cannot be revealed to their employers if they were transmitted by a commercial company. The ruling could apply to MDT messages carried by cellular carriers for public safety agencies. The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by Ontario (S. Calif.) police officers after their text-pager messages were examined by the department in 2002 trying to determine if the officers exceeded a 25,000 monthly message limit. Upon the department’s request, Arch Wireless released a list of the messages, and the officers then sued. Courts have held that employees do not have an expectation of privacy for messages carried on their employer’s computer systems. But in this case the appeals court said there is a privacy expectation if the data is carried on a commercial system. Download (pdf) a copy of the appeals court ruling here.