The Supreme Court is about to decide whether your boss can read your private texts, BBMs, and emails sent from mobile devices, and that includes what you thought were personal communiques between you and your same-sex lover. And all those new “Like” buttons from Facebook, which, when clicked, send the stories you’re reading to your Facebook profile, and enable publishers to include “badges” featuring the Facebook profile photos of users who like their stories, should give you pause about “Liking” anything on a gay site, should you not be out or something.
me likey
2 New Privacy Concerns For You Homos to Worry About
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Marcus
Thank Buddha I work for a super gay-friendly company and don’t have to worry about any of this shit.
Eminent Victorian
The texting bit in the linked article refers to doing so on work-issued devices. If people send inappropriate texts on work-issued devices I don’t understand why they should be surprised their employer doesn’t like that.
Lamar
I just hope they don’t use this as an excise to torment gays. this immediately reminded me of a Queer as Folk episode when Ted gets fired from his work place for looking at gay porn on the computer but his straight colleagues don’t. He couldn’t prove that he was fired because he was gay and I fear a similar situation might occur as a result of this law.
PopSnap
Well, here’s a novel idea: don’t look at porn on work computers/cell phones/whatever!
Can’t you horn dogs wait until 5 or 6 to go home and look at porn all you want???
Jeremy
@PopSnap: Yeah, yeah, Dalai Lama. This is not the first time we hear this advice. Thank God we don’t have a uptight ass like yours, you snob!
Joe K
I dont remember what the law is about personal phone calls from work, but it should be the same. I do agree that anyone should not be looking at porn from work devices, it is like using a work landline for phone sex.
tazz602
If it’s work issues they have every right to monitor what it’s used for. The use of work supplied tools, be they PCs, phones, or anything represents the company or government agency. Keep your personal communications on your own devices that you pay for an it’s a non-issue.
B
No. 7 · tazz602 wrote, “Keep your personal communications on your own devices that you pay for an it’s a non-issue.” … it’s a bit more complex than that in some cases. Some companies provide cell phones for any employee with the employee paying the full cost as an employee benefit – basically they negotiated a group rate to get a discount over the normal fees, which the cellphone companies allow because it reduces their marketing costs. In one case, my employer had a web site with a list of such plans, with one called a “corporate plan” that charged a low but fixed rate per call (no “free” minutes) and that was a good deal if you didn’t use the phone very much. It wasn’t clear from the web page if the term “corporate plan” was my employer’s description or the phone-company’s marketing hype, and it was not clear if it had any connection to my employer. People could legitimately be confused.
If the user is paying the full cost, the employer shouldn’t get a record of the calls. The motivation for setting up such discounted cell phone plans was probably to get more employees to use cell phones.
tazz602
B – that’s definitely not the case here. In your example, yes – it’s a discount plan negotiated by the company but the user is paying for the phone and it is theirs.
BUT – if the device, phone, laptop, desktop, etc. is provided BY work for work purposes, then don’t go surfing craigslist or manhunt on it. It’s not yours, and your employer has every right to track what it is being done on that device since that activity points back to them. Whether you are paying overcharges on uses or not as in this case. In most companies now it’s standard for an employee to sign an Internet usage agreement and it’s spelled out that usage can be tracked.