Privacy in the Workplace

• Author: Paul Wearing
• Pages: 109-111

• 109

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Privacy in the Workplace

What You Should Know

Employees have a reasonable and continuous expectation of privacy in

the personal information stored on a work-issued computer, but it is a

diminished expectation subject to considerations of the truth-seeking

function of the criminal trial process.

A. COMPUTER PRIVACY FOR EMPLOYEES

R v Cole1 was the criminal trial of a teacher who had stored nude and

partially nude photographs of a female student on a laptop computer is-

sued by the school board. The photographs were discovered on a routine

maintenance inspection by a school board technician. The school board

handed the laptop over to the police, and the teacher was charged with

possession of child pornography. At f‌irst instance the teacher was acquit-

ted on the basis of a violation of his rights under the Canadian Charter

of Rights and Freedoms, because the police had had no warrant for the

seizure of the laptop and the f‌iles on it.

The case wound its way to the Supreme Court of Canada, where the

Court ruled that notwithstanding the teacher’s reasonable expectation

of privacy, considerations of the criminal trial process outweighed the

teacher’s privacy rights. It is important to note that the school board had

not required teachers to sign an acceptable use of equipment agree-

ment and had no policy on the searching of work-issued computers or