SOX Center

Q. Your company recently announced a new policy to monitor all outgoing e-mail, including personal correspondence. How concerned should you be?

A. Don’t panic, but definitely watch your back. Mary Crane, president of M C & Associates, a training and consulting firm in Denver, said that if employers actively monitored outgoing e-mail traffic, messages about anything other than work might attract unwanted attention.

“The last thing you want to do is make your employer think you’re slacking off,” Ms. Crane said. “Nothing you’re doing on e-mail is worth jeopardizing your career.”

Q. Do employers have the right to monitor e-mail?

A. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and other regulations require publicly traded companies to archive all e-mail messages. Employers in the private sector also have complete authority to scrutinize every word, provided that they have established a policy and put it into writing.

Don Ulsch, a lawyer at the law firm Jefferson Wells of Brookfield, Wis., said that although this might seem like an invasion of privacy, it isn’t. “The companies own the computer and servers,” said Mr. Ulsch, who heads the firm’s technology risk management practice in Boston. “Anything you do on this equipment actually is information that belongs to them.”

Mr. Ulsch noted that some states might offer protections for employees who work from home and use work computers for personal purposes after business hours.

NYT: The Risk Is All Yours in Office E-Mail