G Suite for Education – used in many schools – and G Suite Enterprise provide more advanced account management features. It also shows the number of files created, edited and shared in Google Drive. If your company has a G Suite account, then the email administrator can see a dashboard with details such as the total number of emails sent and received, and the last time you accessed the account via a web browser or email programme. In my case, for example, there are three devices: a desktop PC, a laptop and a smartphone.Įveryone should check these details from time to time, to look for unexpected entries. You should also go to to find out which computers, mobile phones and other devices have accessed your account. It will also show any accesses made by authorised applications. This will pop up a table showing the type of access (browser, mobile, etc), Location (IP address) and Date/Time. The simplest is to scroll to the bottom of a page of email, find “Last account activity” and click “Details”. There are several ways to check the records for your Gmail account. Gmail activityĮmail services usually keep logs of email access, which can include the IP address and the type of device used. It includes sample warnings on internet and email abuse and a guide to formulating a company policy. Thomson Reuters’ Practical Law site has a good guide to email and internet use at work by Michael Hart and Ellen Temperton from Baker McKenzie LLP. If you must send personal emails at work, you should ideally use your own device and either a VPN or your own internet connection. Note that these filters will also catch emails sent from personal email addresses. This could include sexual or racial harassment, or bullying. Some companies also monitor emails by scanning for key words that suggest illegal or unethical behaviour. Personal emails are harder to monitor, but it would seem reasonable for companies to have access to similar logs, without necessarily being able to read the contents of emails. These things can usually be monitored by phone and server logs. Ultimately, which one takes precedence may be decided in court, and one landmark case went as far as the European court of human rights.Ĭompanies want people to do the work they’re paid to do, so they should have explicit rules about things like making personal phone calls, reading Facebook or viewing pornographic sites at work. However, there is clearly a conflict between the company’s need to manage staff and the employees’ right to privacy. I am not a lawyer so I don’t want to get into legal issues, especially as these vary by country. There’s a version of WhatsApp for Windows and MacOS, so you could consider that. The new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is encouraging companies to adopt secure, encrypted email services, but that won’t happen overnight.Īnd if encryption makes email less convenient, people will use WhatsApp, Signal and other messaging services that are beyond the reach of the company email administrators and auditors. Something juicy can soon reach an audience of thousands.įurther, standard emails are not encrypted and are usually passed on by numerous routers where they could, in theory, be read by anybody who can access them. Emails are, by contrast, extremely easy to forward to others, including – by mistake – the wrong people. Very few people actually trawled through filing cabinets and photocopied things they found. Email isn’t privateĮmail seems to be more private than the letters we dictated to secretaries, but probably isn’t. It’s therefore better to avoid using corporate email addresses for personal emails – or, indeed, anything you don’t want archived. They are part of the audit trail for many negotiations, and as a matter of principle, companies should back them up and archive them. None the less, emails do sometimes lead to contract disputes and lawsuits, and email records can be subpoenaed by courts. Convenience plus the illusion of privacy has led more people to use company email addresses for personal emails. People usually type their own emails, and even business emails tend to be informal. Email has blurred the lines between corporate and private uses.
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