The Forever Email — Tip of the Week

The New York Times revisits a matter I blogged about on December 30, 2007: the firing of a teacher in training because, on her MySpace page, there was a picture of the would be teacher at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” She was discharged. She then sued. She lost. The court pretty much agreed with my post. In the exhaustive Times article on various aspects of the Web and one’s privacy, Jeffrey Rosen says something must be done to keep one email or one picture from ruining one’s life.

There’s little that can be done, however, until employees at all levels realize that emails sent, pictures posted on the Web, and attempts at humor that are misunderstood but now in the Web’s twilight zone are forever. It may be unfair for one email to cause a termination, but employers continue to have a lot of discretion on what to use as the basis for discipline or termination. And besides, the email, the picture, the humor — they’re all things that the employee put out there.

Policies on Internet usage aren’t enough. Employers — human resources representatives — need to periodically have formal or informal sessions with members of the C-suite on down to workers on the plant floor about how an email is forever.