It seems to have come as a shock to many Bay streeters [Note to US readers: Toronto equivalent of Wall Street] that their Blackberry PIN messages were recoverable and that their employers had the right to do so. All of this arising in the aftermath of the Genuity lawsuit.
It’s shocking that this has been shocking. It is by now trite in our culture that virtually any kind of messaging is logged somewhere, and pretty much any business of any note on Bay Street has had Internet usage policies, generally signed by the employee, sometimes every year as well as on hiring, generally included in policy manuals, as well as being reported on more or less constantly by virtually every form of mass media in our society for the last 10 years.
Communications that are intended to remain absolutely private in any circumstance should simply never be committed to writing of any kind. And if what you are writing is being written using your employer’s tools (computer, network, whatever), you ought to assume that they have at least the right to access that communication, quite apart from any question of whether they are actively surveilling you.