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Technology has increasingly blurred the lines between our private and work lives. On the plus side, this means greater flexibility and autonomy. On the downside?

“Employees may have an expectation of privacy at work,” says Katharine H. Parker, a labor and employment attorney with Proskauer Rose, but it’s merely an expectation. “Through company computer and Internet usage policies, most employers retain the right to review, monitor, delete and disclose information on company computer systems. If an employee wants to keep things private, they should use their own personal equipment.” 

“Many employers monitor phone calls now,” adds Mary Ellen Donnelly, an employment attorney with Putney, Twombly, Hall & Hirson. “The bigger companies might monitor employees for keystrokes to see how productive an employee is throughout a day. Some will actually take copies of emails and save them and spotcheck randomly what emails are being sent.” 

In 2007, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that employers could lawfully bar employees from non-work-related use of its email systems. However, the NLRB under the Obama administration is weighing whether employees have the right to use company computers for non-business related activities, including union organizing. “It might change what employees can look at and what they can do,” Donnelly says. 

Employers generally have a right to passwords for any work-related social media accounts, and many states have now passed laws forbidding employers from asking for personal social media account passwords.

Yet in Hispanics United of Buffalo Inc. v. Ortiz, after five workers criticized a coworker on Facebook and were fired, an administrative judge for the NLRB found that the workers’ conduct was protected activity and directed that the workers be reinstated. 

“Those rules about not saying anything bad about your employer on social media are no longer valid,” Donnelly says. 

The EEOC also cracks down on questions employers can ask about criminal history, disability and recreational activities. However, in the age of the Internet, many employers are doing thorough online background checks to vet job candidates. They don’t have to ask; they can find.

“Things that a prospective employer ordinarily cannot ask in an interview, like religion or sexual orientation, can be found on social media,” says Laurie Berke-Weiss, an employment attorney with Berke-Weiss & Pechman. “We all know that everything digital is like radioactivity. It has a half-life of 10,000 years. If you don’t want to see something again, watch what you put on the Internet.”