A Few Dire Warnings and Advice
( Privacy and Hidden Knowledge )
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Your Right to Privacy
About Voice Mail and E-Mail
Suing Corporations or the Government
Reverse Paranoia
Be the Driver, not the Squirrel
1. What about your "Right to Privacy"?
A Pennsylvania U.S. District Court ruled in favor of Pillsbury Company officials who fired an employee after his e-mail with a heading of " Backstabbing B*stards " triggered a red flag which caused them
to review all of his E-mail messages dating back several months.
The Court decided that the firm's responsibility to "prevent inappropriate and unprofessional comments" was of more importance than the employee's privacy rights in this situation. The Court's ruling complements two California court rulings that permitted searches of employee E-mail.
An employee of CellularOne in Nebraska was dismissed, not for e-mail he wrote or sent, but for
e-mail he received.
He filed a suit claiming wrongful dismissal and lost. Nebraska, like many states, is an "at-will" employment state which means there does NOT have to be a valid reason to fire you.
Courts in most states have ruled that an employer may spy on its employees, even to the point of hidden cameras and microphones and e-mail "monitoring", and that they need not notify the employees. However, if it also affects the public or students ( non-employees ),
they
must be notified.
2. Legal Rulings regarding Voice-Mail and E-Mail
Many people are not aware that when they read an E-mail message or listen to a voice mail message and then "Erase It", they may not have removed its availability to others... particularly if your provider is a corporate or institutional business in which you work ( or are a student ). Many if not most "In-House" phone systems routinely tape ALL phone conversations on their systems, including voice mail messages. Similarly, many Institutional or Corporate providers of E-mail services make a "Back-Up" regularly and keep it available to themselves. The good news? According to survey results released by the Society for Human Resources Management ( SHRM ) of Alexandria, Virginia, only 7.7 % of E-mail connected businesses routinely do
"RANDOM REVIEWS" of employee E-mail messages.
The bad news? According to that same survey, 36.4 % of those same E-mail connected businesses access employee or student E-mail
"for business necessity or security" !
Worse news? The survey occurred
PRIOR
to the 9-11 incident or the PATRIOT Act!!! Frequently companies or schools even give you a warning that they may "monitor" communications under certain conditions, but people remain blissfully confident that this must mean in some extreme case and will never affect them... at least until they get their dismissal notices. A good rule of thumb... if you MUST say something that you wouldn't want your employer or school to read, consider a private commercial E-mail provider.( I use Enter.net, for example. ) Although they still have some rights regarding your account they are in most cases precluded from releasing that information to any third party such as your employer, except under a court order.
But remember, if you SEND E-mail to another user who still gets E-mail through his or her employer or school, that message may still come back to haunt you.
Interesting Side Note
The ability for corporations or institutions to monitor an employee's E-mail or Voice Mail is not a two way street. A former employee allegedly used his still active password to enter his former employer's voice mail system and retrieve messages which he used to help him compete with that employer. The FBI arrested the Florida man, charging him with harassment, larceny and 29 counts of computer crime. His bail was set at $510,000.
The Best Answer!
Never put ANYTHING in writing or across a company phone line that you wouldn't be willing to have repeated in front of everyone there! Think before you type or talk!
3. Before You Use a Commercial Airline or Sue A Company or Governmental Agency...
You should probably become aware that although the vast majority of legitimate lawsuits or claims against legitimate losses ( such as those killed in a plain or train crash ) are
" successful ",
most of the successful people who became entitled to a cash settlement are still waiting to get it, many of them as much as ten years or more later... If you or a loved one or a key person in your company plan on using a commercial carrier such as an airplane, train, etc.,
consider
getting either "accident insurance" or "flight insurance" instead of relying on the airline or carrier to reimburse your losses. Although from a strictly financial standpoint, these types of insurance are a "bad bet" ( limited risk, high short term rates ), they are inexpensive in the
highly unlikely
event that a crash should occur, since you will probably never be able to collect anything from the commercial passenger carrier. Flight insurance ( less common than it used to be because most people are aware of how bad a bet it is ) runs about $2 per hundred thousand dollars of coverage typically, and covers a round trip within a short period of time. Accident insurance runs about $7 per month for basic coverage which typically includes about $50,000 of coverage in a personal vehicle and $250,000 in a rental vehicle or commercial passenger carrier such as a plain or train.
But read the terms carefully...
Some of these policies include
exclusions
that wipe out their risk in the likeliest of instances... in which case you could still end up with nothing...
Interesting Side Note ( # 2 )
The vast majority of people who "successfully" sued to get their jobs back after an "unlawful dismissal" lost that job less than two years later and did not/could not sue over the conditions of that loss.
4. Hidden Knowledge That You Really Already Know...
If you are looking for
Someone Else
to protect you, whether to protect you from yourself or from an external threat, you are suffering from what I call
" Reverse Paranoia ".
Just as it is highly unlikely that people are really " out to get you ", it is equally unlikely that they " are out to save you or protect you ". The plain and simple fact is that most people ( and even more so, most companies ) are only concerned with themselves and those directly affecting themselves. You are incidental to them. They pay as little attention to your needs as possible unless you pose a threat to them. What about God? ( Some of you were already asking that question, or I would not address it, and my apologies to those offended by my mention of it. ) Unlike some earthbound persons, I do not purport to speak for God ( if such exists, and I happen to believe it does ), but I will say that many religions teach that God gave us free will to determine our own fate... I interpret that as allowing a "laissez-faire" ( hands off ) policy unless directly consulted on a particular line item. To me, that means that for the average day-to-day running of things, we are expected to take care of ourselves. If a particular line item ( drugs, alcohol, a difficult situation, etc. ) is too much for us, we may be permitted to ask for help, but even then we may be expected to take a reasonable amount of care on our own. ( That is one reason why "good things sometimes happen to bad people and bad things sometimes happen to good people ". There may be others. ) I do believe that excuses are worthless attempts to justify poor behaviour, and that the worst excuse is blaming things on someone else. Take responsibility for yourself.
5. Be the Driver...
On the highway of life, you are either the driver or the squirrel running across in front of the driver.
Sometimes the squirrel has faith in the fact that the driver will avoid it and fails to consider the risks of its actions. Sometimes the squirrel begins to think it is so fast and good at crossing the road that it doesn't need to consider the driver, and fails to take responsible action to avoid the risk. And sometimes the driver is so preoccupied with its own path that it doesn't pay any attention to the squirrel, and the squirrel becomes roadkill.
On the road of life, it is better to be the driver.
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