Generally, employees have a privacy expectation in their personnel files, contact information, and work related information. However, this expectation of privacy is not limitless, especially when the employee publically airs his or her work experiences on social media sites for the public to see. Courts have held that employees can waive this right to privacy once they make disclosures in public for everyone else to read via social media networks.
For example, in a case not in the employment context, a California court reviewed the issue of whether an author who posts an article on myspace.com can state a cause of action for invasion of privacy and for intentional infliction of emotional distress against a person who submits that article to a newspaper for republication. The case, Moreno v. Hanford Sentinel, Inc. involved a college student who had moved away from her home town of Coalinga, California. She wrote “An ode to Coalinga” and posted it on her site on MySpace.com. The ode badmouthed her hometown. Six days after publishing it on MySpace, she took the writing off of the site, but the town’s high school principal submitted the writing to the local newspaper for publication. The newspaper republished the ode in the letters to the editor section and listed Moreno’s full name even though she only used her first name on her MySpace page. The ode must have contained some serious dirt on the city, as it resulted in death threats against Moreno’s family, and eventually forced her family to close a 20 year old business and move out of town.
Moreno sued for invasion of her privacy alleging that her post on MySpace was only supposed to be viewed by a few of her friends, and because she removed the post six days after publishing the article. The court rejected Moreno’s theory that the newspaper’s publication violated her right to privacy because her post to MySpace was made virtually to everyone with an Internet connection. The Court reasoned that, “[Moreno’s] affirmative act made her article available to any person with a computer and thus opened it to the public eye. Under these circumstances, no reasonable person would have had an expectation of privacy regarding the published material. As pointed out by appellants, to be a private fact, the expectation of privacy need not be absolute.” Therefore, the court held that “the fact [Moreno] expected a limited audience does not change the above analysis. By posting the article on myspace.com, [Moreno] opened the article to the public at large. Her potential audience was vast.” The court concluded that Moreno therefore could not asserted a cause of action for invasion of her right to privacy against the newspaper.
Even though this case is not involving employment information, a similar analysis would apply to an employee who posts information on social media about workplace issues. Once the employee places the information about his or her work circumstances on social media, this greatly reduces the employee’s privacy in the subject matter. However, an employer should be cautious, and use common sense in responding to such posts. For example, if an employee posts negative information about the company on social media, it would obviously not give the employer a right to disclose the employee’s health information and documents from the employee’s personnel file. Alternatively, if the employee posts about how bad an employer treated him or her, the employer would have the right to publically set the record straight with facts specific to rebut the allegations made by the employee.
Employers should use common sense in responding publically to an employee’s or former employee’s posts on social media and keep any discussions limited to the facts and issues raised by the employee. Furthermore, employers should approach situations with caution when an employee’s posts on social media are password protected and only friends of the employee can view the post. Hacking or gaining access to social media posts under false pretenses is most likely illegal, and would tilt the analysis back into the employee’s favor that the information was not disclosed to everyone and, therefore, would be considered private. In addition, employers may never retaliate against employees for making complaints via the internet or otherwise, and should be careful in making employment decisions based on employees’ complaints about workplace issues even if made on the Internet.