[I am not a lawyer]

One thing to keep in mind too – in today’s world we have lots of student privacy laws we have to worry about.  Things like FERPA require us to be very conscious of the data we keep about students.  Seemingly innocuous data containing student grades, or email addresses simply in an email would require us to keep this data on preemies.  This includes data from student employees. 

Another item to consider would be data that is considered confidential to the university.  Things like passwords to servers, access codes to websites, security codes to buildings, or just private information from vendors, etc. is all information that I’m sure the University wants to keep.

I feel that anything I create in email is property of the university.  This would not be something I should expect to take with me.

[/Psudo Lawyer Talk]

-Nick

From: Kramer, Jack [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2010 9:52 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] Outgoing employee's email...

I think the biggest concern with this whole thing is not just MSU policy but our legal obligations as admins to preserve information that may be necessary for a discovery process at a later date. There are several different laws that would govern that and they all overlap in strange ways, especially in the realm of higher ed. I think before we can really establish any kind of policy as a community we need clear direction from counsel – we are, after all, paying those attorneys the big bucks.

As far as privacy / publicity goes, there was a Supreme Court decision very recently that dealt with a similar issue in California, where a police officer was investigated for personal texts sent with an employer-provided device, even though the police officer had agreed to pay for overage charges on the device. The court found that the police department was legally allowed to request and view the text messages sent through the device, no matter the content. This will be especially relevant to us as we are technically employees of a local unit of government (universities are organized as governments under state law) and so are covered by the decision. The point I’m making is that our students are paying for a bandwidth service — in effect, the university acts as their ISP — and are covered under the laws that apply to that situation. As employees, we are afforded no such privileges. An employee should not consider their communications using employer-provided devices to be private, personal property; rather, they should be considered a privileged use of employer resources and information. At the end of the day, those communications belong to the university and not the user. I see no reason why this would not apply to student employees, nor do I see any reason why this would apply to the private communications of a student who happens to also work for the university. If drawing a distinctive line is worrisome, why not simply provide email accounts to student employees? A secondary NetID is easily purchased or an account can be established on an internal mail system.

Of course, none of that answers the more pressing questions of how we are expected to archive emails, how long we must retain them, and what ability we have (if any) to release emails to departing employees. A simple regulation like those applying to retention of tax records would ease the burden significantly. I know that I should be retaining 7 years of tax records in case of an IRS audit — it’s a clear regulation easily discerned from the law. What we need, as I said before, is clear direction from the general counsel’s office before one of us finds themselves on the wrong end of a legal discovery process.
----
Jack Kramer
Computer Systems Specialist
University Relations, Michigan State University
w: 517-884-1231 / c: 248-635-4955



> From: Alexander Hawley <[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]>
> Reply-To: Alexander Hawley <[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2010 09:13:40 -0400
> To: "[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] Outgoing employee's email...
>
>> all MSU (non-student) e-mails ... should be turned over to Archives for
>> preservation
>
> And employees who are also students?
>
> Student employees?
>
> So the day a student is hired fulltime the AUP switches from privacy to
> publicity? That's weird.
>
>
>> delete an email message
>
> Nightmare. I've seen some instructions for admins on how to silently replicate
> all incoming & outgoing for this very purpose. Ouch.
>
> Or, better yet. Forward (do not keep copy) to Gmail or other.
>
>
> -AH