USFA e-Letter: Is Big Sibling Watching?
At USFA’s last AGM in October, following the report of the Grievance Officer, members had an informal but interesting discussion about electronic privacy. The key message from the Grievance Committee was “Don’t Press the Send Button!” without carefully considering the content of your message. Some members then asked about the possibility of the Employer monitoring e-mail, and related issues of privacy of documents on one's computer.Our Collective Agreement has one of the country’s strongest electronic privacy clauses. Article 10.5.11 states that “Except where a serious allegation of misconduct involving computer use has been made against an employee, the employer agrees that the computer files and electronic mail and media of employees shall not be examined. The Association shall be made aware of any filtering of electronic mail and media for any purpose, including spam filtering.”
Article 10.5.11 is designed to protect appropriate confidential information: data, patents, articles in progress, information about students and employees for whom you are responsible, and so forth.
No clause can protect you from the consequences of sending abusive, hateful, threatening, or just plain stupid e-mails. There is no need for the Employer to monitor anything: the aggrieved parties will complain, and then it is straightforward to track down emails to the source machine, where remnants of every document you have ever created continue to live on your hard drive, whether you have deleted them or not. That’s how backups and disk restore programs work. Even Hotmail correspondence can “leak” onto your hard drive during cache operations and be recovered by experts. Such information has been used as evidence in dismissal arbitrations.
Many other technologies carry hidden signatures. Many colour laser printers encode the serial number of the printer and, sometimes, the time that a document was printed, with patterns of tiny yellow dots invisible to the naked eye. This is subsidized by law enforcement agencies to track counterfeiters. Similar techniques can hide serial numbers of cameras in digital images.