Exposure from Employees’ Use of E-mail

Posted by arlene

E-mail is qualitatively different from the “snail mail” and fax machines that preceded it in the workplace. First, e-mail is usually connected to the same computer networks that house much of a company’s sensitive information. As a result, an employee can attach anything—from the corporate payroll (to a confidential deal memorandum to your wholesale price list–onto a message and send it out to a friend, a colleague, or a reporter in a matter of seconds, without ever having to risk being seen at the printer or the fax machine. Similarly, incoming mail may also have access to the network, potentially exposing your company to virus programs and to having information on your network that is illegal for you to possess—from child pornography to business data froma competitor—without your knowledge or consent. There are also employee e-mail uses that, while short of breaching confidentiality obligations or violating criminal law, can harm and embarrass your company.

One major culprit is misdirected e-mail. It is frighteningly easy to send a message to the wrong recipient. Even if the sender realizes the mistake two seconds after clicking “send,” few if any e-mail systems allow message cancellation once it is transmitted. Imagine that the message is one sharply critical of your company’s biggest customer, but instead of forwarding the customer’s latest unreasonable request to a colleague, your employee instead sends both the request and his lambasting response right back to the customer’s CEO. You will be dealing with an unhappy account, if not an ex-account, within a matter of minutes.

Similarly (and perhaps more common), in the case of a miiltiperson online discussion, a private reply to one participant may instead be sent to the entire list. Depending on the contents of that reply, any number of consequences may descend on the sender, intended recipient, and even their employers. The misdirection problem is made worse by a feature of many popular e-mail programs that automatically matches a typed name with an e-mail address from the composer’s address book. There may be people with similar names within the address book, and a note meant for John Jones may instead go to James Jones (whose name comes earlier in the alphabetical list). When a single program and address book services the internal and Internet e-mail systems, this can cause company messages to go out to the world and vice versa.

In most cases, an e-mail message is considered “in writing,” and e-mail is often stored long after it has been read and may exist on backup tapes months or years after both sender and recipient delete the note (as Oliver North found to his dismay). To the extent that an e-mail message sent from or within your company contains a serious allegation or slanderous accusations, or otherwise violates applicable law, the offended party and law enforcement officials may be able to use it against you much more easily than had the same offensive message been said in a telephone call. Even an otherwise personal message sent by an employee (such as a variation on the “Make Money Fast” chain letter that pervades the Internet, or an advertisement for a home-based business that makes fraudulent claims about a product or service) using your company’s system might bring you into a private or governmental enforcement action, perhaps long after the employee has left the company.

To maximize the chances that your e-mail connection will benefit rather than devastate your business, it’s crucial that your company both make and enforce a proper e-mail usage policy for your employees.

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