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The other aspect I see here is that the ability to get into a former employee's email account may be important for business continuity. Employee dies or leaves

The other aspect I see here is that the ability to get into a former employee's email account may be important for business continuity. Employee dies or leaves suddenly? They may have access to online accounts or information in their email that didn't quite make it onto the corporate wiki or that no one else had access to (although a good company would minimize that). Important to be able to get in there and just get stuff done. On the other hand - just the other day I was looking at "Blind" (because it got advertized on my Instagram feed) that claims to be a "private"-ish social network for employees of a company to share information. Many of the reviews claim there are ulterior motives, etc. but the chief complaint seems to be that it requires verification through work email, and obviously that's begging for your employer to find out about your involvement in these back channels. Online employer verification that doesn't give yourself away, and isn't as easy to spoof as LinkedIn? That seems like a hard problem to solve...

izacus 9y ago
Not being able to read dead employee's emails seems like a really tiny inconvenience (especially since there are so many ways an employee can effectively delete mails that you're doing something catastrophically wrong if your business continuity is dependant upon a mail account access) in comparison of constant monitoring of peoples private communication.
- TallGuyShort 9y ago
  And "we may need to occasionally access your account on company-run email servers" is also a really different thing in contrast with "constant monitoring of peoples private communication". I doubt any company really gets a positive ROI on constantly monitoring people's chats, so it's their loss. I think other commenters have made a sufficiently good case for your work email not being considered private communication anyway. I mean, you're also doing something catastrophically wrong personally if your privacy is dependent on a company wanting to read company-related data on their own infrastructure but thinking, "Oh, no... a European court might frown on this..."

izacus 9y ago

Not being able to read dead employee's emails seems like a really tiny inconvenience (especially since there are so many ways an employee can effectively delete mails that you're doing something catastrophically wrong if your business continuity is dependant upon a mail account access) in comparison of constant monitoring of peoples private communication.

TallGuyShort 9y ago
And "we may need to occasionally access your account on company-run email servers" is also a really different thing in contrast with "constant monitoring of peoples private communication". I doubt any company really gets a positive ROI on constantly monitoring people's chats, so it's their loss. I think other commenters have made a sufficiently good case for your work email not being considered private communication anyway. I mean, you're also doing something catastrophically wrong personally if your privacy is dependent on a company wanting to read company-related data on their own infrastructure but thinking, "Oh, no... a European court might frown on this..."