Employee Social Media Pages Protected Under SCA

A New Jersey federal court determined that employers would be in violation of the Stored Communications Act if they accessed employees’ private social media pages – unless someone with access to the private page willingly forwards the information. The case featured an employee who made inappropriate posts about her job on Facebook, which had privacy settings to hide the page from the employer. However, a co-worker with access to the page forwarded the posts to the employer, and the employee was fired. The case is likely to set precedent for many legal employment disputes concerning social media, because it establishes that employers seeking access to private Facebook or other social media pages may not do so in any way a court may find coercive.