Supreme Court Allows Employer to Read Employees' Personal Text Messages

In the long awaited case of City of Ontario v Quon, the Supreme Court has ruled that city officials could search the personal text messages sent on text devices owned by the city and provided to certain employees for business use. As explained here, although the city is a government employer and the Court was able to resolve the case on fairly narrow Fourth Amendment grounds, the decision may well reflect the Court's inclination to give public and private employers alike broad discretion to monitor even personal communications made using a computer, pager or other device supplied by the employer.