I Spy Something Read! Employer Monitoring of Personal Employee Webmail Accounts

This Recent Development focuses on a specific type of surveillance: private employers’ monitoring of their employees’ personal webmail accounts, such as Yahoo or Hotmail. First, this Recent Development reviews two recent district court decisions that involve employee use of web-based e-mail accounts at work. The Recent Development then argues that given the unsettled state of the law of employer e-mail surveillance of webmail, the courts should expand the laws allowing employer monitoring to explicitly include personal employee webmail accounts accessed by employees on company computer networks or Internet connections.