A California appeals court ruled yesterday that your job has no right to obtain your work emails or text messages if they are stored by a third party provider. That means that the roughly 30% of Microsoft Outlook users whose emails are handled by a vendor, for example, would be protected from having their employers snoop on them. If your job stores employee emails internally, they can still read them. Regardless, this is good news for leakers in this age of corporate snooping on your Facebook pages. Who do you have to thank for this newfound privacy? A cop who sent sexy text messages from his work phone!:

In August 2002, Quon and another officer exceeded a department limit of 25,000 characters per month for texting. The police chief ordered a subordinate to obtain transcripts of the officers' text messages to determine whether the pagers were being used purely for work purposes.

The provider, Arch Wireless, sent the department transcripts of the messages. The city determined that many of Quon's messages were personal, and several were sexually explicit.

The court found that Arch Wireless violated the federal Stored Communications Act, which prohibits providers from divulging the contents of any communication that is maintained on the service without a warrant.

So check to make sure your work uses and outside email contractor; then, spend all day texting dirty things to your girlfriend and sending us spiteful leaks via email. America! Freedom!

[LAT]