A few weeks ago I wrote about a recent situation in which the Des Moines public school system superintendent's career was brought to a standstill (it is yet to see whether it is temporary or permanent) by using the public school email system to exchange 115 personal messages, and including at least 40 cases of sexually explicit messages, with her lover, married with children highly decorated Army Captain Hintz. Since that time he has been fired from his position as head of Army Recruiting Command, a Des Moines-based recruiting company. So not only was one person's misuse of her employer's email system the cause of her own career downward detour, it also has had ripple effects and derailed the career of the man who was corresponding with her, and likely also further ripples out to damage his family.
More privacy and security lessons
In addition to the lessons from my earlier post, this provides additional lessons:
It is worth repeating: Never assume that everyone knows what is and is not acceptable with regard to messaging. That assumption could lead to not only problems for your workers, but also for your organization, and to the others outside of the organization with whom your workers are communicating.
Bottom line for all organizations, from the largest to the smallest
You need to establish messaging policies that clearly communicate that all emails sent through the company email system are subject to monitoring, and that no one using the system should have any expectation of privacy for the messages. Also make it clear that, for their own personal privacy protection, you recommend they not exchange personal information with someone who is using a business email address. And certainly make clear to workers that if they have any type of digital communications they want to keep private that they'd better use their own personally-owned devices, preferably that are not also used for work purposes, to send and receive them using personal email addresses.
Other information about messaging security and privacy
Here are additional recent articles and posts about messaging and email privacy and security: