Author: Stephen Mason
ISBN No: 0 9543245 1 X
Review date: 08/12/2025
No of pages: 230
Publisher: XPL
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
The sixth and latest edition of this book aims to show organisations how to avoid the problems inherent with email and other electronic information.
The book aims to show organisations how to avoid the problems inherent with electronic information, rather than facing compliance and legal fines later, and is by internet and email barrister Stephen Mason.
Networked communications covers a wide range of hardware and software and the law relating to their use in the workplace is complex. The previous editions of this book were entitled Email, the Internet and Work but the word email will simply no longer describe the issues that face employers and their IT managers, Stephen Mason says.
Mr Mason, who before becoming a barrister spent nine years in bomb disposal, considers that for a large number of organisations email is a time-bomb which could explode if not defused by defined policies. So many of the high profile circumstances in which Arthur Anderson, Norwich Union, Jo Moore who notoriously said of 9-11 in an email that it was a good day to ‘bury’ bad news; and a number of Wall Street investment banks and others become trapped, he says, could have been prevented.
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What he says
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He said of the 2003 edition: ‘Still too few organisations have an email retention policy – although the way the document disposal policy was implemented at Arthur Anderson made people think there was something wrong – and most do not have an efficient retrieval and audit trail system. Email and the internet are dangerous without proper safeguards in place. Ill-thought out remarks expose every organisation and its employees to even greater pressures when made by email. Ask Jo Moore, special adviser to Transport Secretary Stephen Byers, who said in an email on Sept 11, 2001 ‘It’s now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury?.’
Mr Mason, a Panel Member of the Computer Law and Security Report, intends that his book will help an organisation understand how the use of email and the internet must be controlled, with documentation and retention policies set at boardroom level.
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Staff misuse
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He added in 2003: ‘The misuse of email by employees is quite astonishing. One survey indicated that 60pc of traffic was personal, while only 40pc was for business purposes. Every organisation now faces increasing problems associated with email use, and human resource departments now spend more time on email and internet abuse by employees than any other type of misdemeanour. It is costing organisations a great deal in wasted time and serious money. From the day an email archiving policy is implemented, an organisation could see savings in terms of productivity and other costs, such as less time spent on dealing with email misuse, for instance."
Mr Mason says defamation, obscene publications, breach of confidentiality and formation of contract by employees are areas of concern. As part of this concise guide to the legal issues, he covers the tricky topic of monitoring of email and internet use and the rules relating to employees and personal mail. He points to the Information Commissioner’s "Code for Employment Records", that technical means should be deployed to provide for security of emails, such as encryption. The note to the relevant benchmark states that the employer "must not" transmit confidential information about a worker by email "without taking appropriate security measures".
œ10 Gives Right to Demand Personal Information
"The level of employees and other people’s awareness of their rights under the Act has gone up from 27pc to 42pc, according to the Information Commissioner. For just œ10, people can demand to know what you have got on them in your database. Some documents should not be held for too long, such as private emails sent over the corporate system by employees."
Mr Mason’s book has examples of recent cases from the law reports, and guides the reader through the wide range of issues that affect an organisation. In his last chapter he suggests technical solutions are now emerging which can help to avoid the problems. He looks at the criteria that organisations should consider when buying software to address the problems. "There is software out there that offers retention and retrieval policies, secure archiving, encryption, and provides audit trails that help provide for greater evidential weight in the legal discovery process. Regulatory and compliance issues are also addressed in some software. Putting an email archiving policy into operation could produce savings for any organisation."
