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Comment by Carpetsmoker | Hacker News Reader

In the Netherlands there was a court case which ruled that an employer cannot just read an employees work email, as even work-related emails are considered private information.

There are some exceptions of course: if you notify the employee and have a justified reason you can check some emails. So it's not outright forbidden. It matters a lot on the case and what you did, exactly.

I'm not aware of the situation in other countries.

(In Dutch: https://www.cnvvakmensen.nl/nextnow/blog/2016/march/mag-de-b... and https://www.sprengersadvocaten.nl/publicaties/wanneer-mag-ee...)

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I like this personally. I can have a private conversation with a coworker in the break room, why not by email? If I wanted to include my boss I would have CC'd her.

This is not the current state of the law in the US however.

Can an employer set up a microphone in the break area without letting you know?

Depends on the state. I believe there are several in which the answer is "yes".

https://www.justia.com/50-state-surveys/recording-phone-call...

Also, depends on to what extent that room can be considered public. (IANAL TINLA)

Moreover, a lot of computer systems in the USA, for decades, have included a message telling employees that their access and use of the computer may be monitored, which seems similar to me to a sign in the break room letting you know if video/audio recording is in progress...

If your boss wanted to be included, she could have Bcc'ed herself.

When he she or it, is a gsuite admin ;)

This is a large part of the justification in Europe - that the conventional expectations of (some degree of) privacy should extend into new mediums, because work makes up such a substantial part of our lives that employees need to accept that parts of employees private lives will happen at work, and they need to act accordingly.

Use your personal email accounts. Problem solved.

Ask the former secretary of state how well that went for her.

It's not always an option, even if they can't read your email casually, your company may still have perfectly legitimate reasons to keep it under their control for reasons of auditing etc.

In some of the regulated organisations I’ve worked in, every single piece of email, web, or IM traffic has been scanned. At a minimum for DLP and malicious content reasons, and usually by profanity/obscenity filters too. How could that possibly work with such a regulation? Every communication is read, at a minimum by a computer, and if you trigger an alert, it will usually be read by a human being as well. If such a regulation allowed for that to take place, then it would be a very weak privacy regulation. If it didn’t allow for that, then it would interfere with the basic compliance requirements of a lot of industries.

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