By Pat Murphy
The Daily Record Newswire
BOSTON — An Illinois employer may be liable for violating state and federal privacy laws by accessing personal e-mails through an AOL account a former employee had left active on her work computer.
That was the conclusion reached last week by the Illinois Appellate Court in Borchers v. Franciscan Tertiary Province of the Sacred Heart.
In 1994, Diane Borchers began working as the food service director for Mayslake Village, Inc., a not-for-profit corporation that provides housing to low- and moderate-income senior citizens.
Her job involved planning menus, ordering food, taking inventory and managing food services staff.
Mayslake Village provided Borchers with a computer which she used to place food orders via the Internet.
The employer also provided Borchers with an e-mail account in order to communicate with vendors and employees. Mayslake’s written policy concerning workplace computers permitted “occasional personal use” apart from legitimate business-related uses.
In 2004, Mayslake switched from its dial-up Internet service with CompuServe to a high-speed service with Comcast.
During the transition, Borchers downloaded AOL onto her work computer and used her personal AOL account to handle work-related e-mails.
Mayslake eventually issued Borchers a Comcast e-mail address. Although an icon for AOL remained on her computer desktop screen, from that point on Borchers used the Comcast account for work-related e-mails.
The end of Borchers’ tenure at Mayslake began in early 2007 when she reported to human resources that she was being sexually harassed by her supervisor, Michael Frigo.
Mayslake conducted an internal investigation and determined that there was no evidence of harassment.
Of course, the relationship between Borchers and Frigo chilled considerably in the wake of the sexual harassment investigation. Evidently, the stress became too much for Borchers and she left work on March 16, 2007, never to return.
Borchers went on disability for mental health problems, but she wasn’t through with her former employer. In June 2007, Borchers filed a sexual harassment charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Meanwhile, Mayslake was in the process of transitioning to a new food service director.
When Borchers’ temporary replacement became overwhelmed with all the details of the job, Frigo directed his administrative assistant, Katherine Maxwell, to check Borchers’ old e-mails to make sure nothing was slipping through the cracks.
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