Professor Chander Discusses Supreme Court Privacy Case on KFBK
Professor Anupam Chander commented for a news report on KFBK radio on the recent announcement by the U.S. Supreme Court that it would decide whether privacy rights covered a worker's personal text message on employer-owned equipment.
Broadcast on December 15, the news report featured Professor Chander discussing several legal issues related to the case, in which personal text messages sent by an Ontario, California police officer were made public by a supervisor. The Supreme Court will review a federal appeals court ruling that reading the text messages amounted to a violation of the officer's privacy rights and an unreasonable search, marking the first instance in which the Court has made a ruling about privacy rights in the context of the emerging technology of social media.
Professor Chander suggested that the police officer's text messages, some of which were intimate communications between spouses, may well be within the limits of "the notion of a reasonable expectation of privacy."
"I think there are expectations that your communications with your wife, even using an electronic device provided by your company, should be thought of as private," he said. "We want to be very careful as to what we allow employers to do."
Professor Anupam Chander is a leading scholar in the law of globalization and digitization, and has written widely on international law, cyber law, and corporate law.