The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear Ontario v. Quon, with the substantive issue of whether or not employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to the text messages they send on devices owned by their employers.

While the case involves public employees, the Supreme Court's decision in this area of electronic communications and privacy may potentially impact standards in private as well as public workplaces.

A federal appeals court in California decided that a police officer Jeff Quon had a right to privacy regarding the texts he sent on his pager issued by the city of Ontario Police Department, even though his chief discovered that some of texts were sexually explicit messages to his girlfriend. Reading the messages without a suspicion of wrongdoing on the part of the officer violated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches, the court ruled.

The city of Ontario's defense, in part, was it's policy stating that it "reserves the right to monitor and log all network activity including e-mail and Internet use, with or without notice." The police chief reviewed transcripts of the text messages to determine whether the devices were being used mostly for personal messages.

When the department handed out pagers to SWAT team members, it said that officers using them also for personal purposes could pay for any overage charges.According to the the three judges conclusions in the circuit court's opinion supporting Quin, a policy that personal messages were allowed on the devices meant Quon "had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the text messages.

The judges acknowledged that the "recently minted standard of electronic communication via e-mails, text messages, and other means opens a new frontier in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that has been little explored."