Is Your Boss Allowed To Read Your Text Messages If He Pays Your Phone Bill?

As everybody knows, text messages are private, and obviously employees don’t find it funny when their bosses want to go through this messages. This was the case as a policeman took his employer to court after police department staff read his text messages.

This policeman had exceeded the monthly text allowance paid for by his employer, so the police department asked its service provider to hand over records of the contents of his messages. This obviously wasn’t too nice a move, and the judge probably thought the same when he decided that the service provider had breached federal Stored Communications Act, and the text messages were covered by the 4th amendment. Simply put, the employer can’t read the employee’s text messages without the employee agreeing to it, or without a policy in place warning staff that their messages might be monitored. This is probably good news to everybody, unless you’re an employer.