In a landmark case in 2006 on the subject of bullying in the workplace; the House of Lords have changed the law so as to make employers liable for workplace harassment even if they were not in any way negligent.
The House of Lords decided that the Prevention from Harassment Act 1997 covers the behaviour of employees at work even when the employer has not caused or failed to prevent the offending behaviour. Those employers now have vicarious liability for the acts of employees.
Previously, employees had to prove that the employer was negligent in not stopping bullying taking place and that it had caused them psychological damage.
The new ruling means that companies can be sued even if the company cannot be expected to have known about the bullying, and this ruling is certainly wide enough to include the use of inappropriate image materials as the vehicle for e-bullying.
This decision has serious implications for employers as it gives employees who are bullied or harassed at work a further basis on which to claim compensation from their employers. Moreover, some of the existing limitations and defences will not be available. For example, an employer has a defence under existing discrimination legislation if it can show that it took all reasonably practicable steps to prevent discriminatory harassment occurring – this defence was recently made out where an employer had implemented an effective harassment policy. This would not help an employer facing a claim that it was vicariously liable for an employee’s harassment under the Prevention from Harassment Act 1997.
As we know that harassment takes place in the workplace through the use of pornographic images, it seems that the only avenue forward for employers in avoiding the breadth of this decision is to technologically interdict the harassment and the inappropriate image content employed therein so as to stop it reaching the intended target.
This new law should make employers realise that an effective email and image filtering solution is now a must for any digital workplace and is now the only legal defence in terms of the law and vicarious liability.
Source: image-analyzer.com
The Utah-based Anti-Spam company Unspam Technologies has filed a one billion dollar lawsuit on behalf of over 20,000 internet users. The suit was filed in Virginia under the CAN-SPAM Act and Virginia law.
They are targeting anyone who targets our members with email spam, comment spam, or harvesting. This lawsuit is unique because they believe it is the first major case in the US to bring a claim against spammers for harvesting email addresses.
Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spam-bots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it
For more info visit, http://www.projecthoneypot.org/index.php
Monitoring employees’ internet & telephone use at work may contravene EU human rights laws, after a landmark case in the European Court of Human Rights last week.
The case involved a public-sector employee, who won €3,000 in damages and €6,000 in court costs and expenses, after her communications were intercepted by her employer, Carmarthenshire College. Lynette Copland successfully took the UK government to court after her personal internet usage and telephone calls were monitored by one of her bosses in 1999.
This ruling means that the private use of company telecoms equipment and internet access may be protected under European human rights legislation, if the company has an acceptable personal-use policy and fails to inform the employee that their communications may be monitored. Employee communications are also covered by human rights legislation if the organisation has no explicit acceptable use policy and fails to inform the employee of the monitoring of personal email.
Privacy law firm, Pinsent Masons, said that although businesses now have clear guidance for monitoring work communications under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000, personal communications at work may be protected by the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Human Rights Act 1998. “The lawful business practice regulations allow an employer to monitor and intercept business communications, so the court is implying that private use of a telecommunications system, assuming it is authorised via an acceptable-use policy, can be protected [by human rights legislation],” said Dr Chris Pounder, a privacy specialist. “The ruling is important in that it reinforces the need for a statutory basis for any interference with respect to private use of a telecommunications system by an employee,” Pounder added.
Source: ZDNet, 11 April 2007
Changes to UK Sexual Offences Act could mean negligent companies face listing on the registry.
The inclusion of email harassment in the revised UK Sexual Offences Act could open companies up to legal troubles, said an industry insider.
The UK Sexual Offences Act 2003 was recently updated to include “improper use of public communications.” Because of this, a person sending sexually harassing emails could be handed a sexual offences prevention order (SOPO) and therefore be included on the national sex offender registry.
“It really has tremendous implications for any organisation because the widening of the sexual offenders act could mean employers have vicarious liability,” said Ed Macnair, CEO of internet security firm Marshal. “The person sending is prosecutable, but also the organisation.” He cited one case where a London hospital was held liable in a harassment suit involving members of staff and another in the US where an employee’s wife sued her husband’s firm because they facilitated his child pornography habits.
“You don’t want your chief operating officer on the sexual offender registry because somebody in the company did something,” Macnair said.
Source: ITPro