The use of personal email accounts to bypass corporate and government email systems and their regulatory safeguards has been making headlines over the last couple of weeks. There was the case of Wal-Mart fighting a wrongful dismissal lawsuit by using evidence obtained from personal email accounts as discussed on Roger Matus’ blog.
And the highly publicized case of White House officials using non-government email accounts for political communications in connection with the sacking of the US-attorneys as well as the infamous Jack Abramoff investigation.

What really caught my attention though was last weeks article in Computerworld.

The article points out that companies can potentially be exposed:

“The concern is that if company communications are being conducted outside official corporate e-mail systems, there’s no way to control their security, preservation or use, something that can leave companies vulnerable to a wide variety of legal problems and regulatory compliance issues.”

A follow-up article further expands on the issue.

While the legal grounds for controlling outside email use by employees are still unclear, companies would be well advised to monitor the issue closely and perhaps proactively implement policies and technology solutions to reduce the associated risks.

Technorati Tags: email compliance, government communications, email monitoring

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