This spring, the Supreme Court plans to hear a case that sprung from a lawsuit SWAT team Sergeant Jeff Quon and three other officers filed against the police department in Ontario, California, after the police chief read their personal text messages. If you think the idea of your boss keeping tabs on your bad grammar and heavy use of emoticons is bad, Quon had also used his work pager to engage in some pretty serious sexting.
To be fair to his boss, Quon did sign a city policy that states that he's only allowed limited personal use of department electronics and that he shouldn't expect any measure of privacy -- so maybe he should have thought before he started sending racy messages into the ether. Regardless, Quon and Co. won the battle at the local level, on the grounds that the chief reading the texts amounted to "unreasonable search," which the U.S. Constitution doesn't truck with.
Now the city has appealed to the Supreme Court, who will decide in June whether or not Quon was in the right, and, more importantly, whether you have the right to text with abandon, free from the peering eyes of your employers.
With mobile technology becoming more and more entrenched in our lives, this Supreme Court decision could be a doozy.
What do you think? Should your texts be as open for review as your performance? Or are some thing sacred?