When he was fired, Scott Sidell was angry suitable. soon after he found out that his former employer was reading his personal Yahoo e-mail messages, after he had left the company.

In a lawsuit that he filed in May against Structured Settlement Investments, the finance company he used to run, Sidell claims that executives at the company went so far as to read e-mail messages that he had sent to his lawyers discussing his strategy for winning an arbitration claim by his lost job.

“It’s kind of like the other side gets your playbook or they’re spying on your locker room,” said Russell Green, a lawyer representing Sidell. He said that his client was now using a new e-mail address.

The lawsuit filed by Sidell in U.S. District Court in Connecticut involves an unsettled area of the law, where changes in technology create tension amoung expectations of personal privacy and companies’ rights to monitor the equipment they

supply to employees. The case’s strange combination of facts, which are in dispute, paves the way for a decision that could help set a precedent for dealing with personal e-mail at work.

The law governing e-mail communications is still evolving. Generally, courts have found that employers can monitor employees’ e-mail communications on company computers. But courts have plus recognized greater privacy protection for e-mail messages sent using personal, Web-based e-mail accounts. For example, that month a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California ruled that personal text messages sent on two-way pagers provided to police officers in Ontario, California, were protected from the division.

Sidell’s case gives the courts an opportunity to address other questions, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy data Center in Washington. “This case raises a lot of new issues that reflect the changing place of e-mail…

Orginal post by Top Tech News