Carolyn:

There may be work-around solutions, albeit a bit cumbersome. The easiest
-- and probably best -- solution that has been suggested by others so
far is to use a personal laptop, wifi (outside of the government
network), and a public email account to conduct your association
business.  A couple of other ideas, if using your own laptop is not
practical:

If your government agency has not blocked access to public email
services (gmail, for example) you could create a gmail account that
reflects your association role (e.g.,
[log in to unmask]).  My understanding from our IT
Department is that city internet-use records would show a visit to the
Gmail URL, but would not capture what correspondance and attachments
came in and out of that account.  (Though I will defer to the techies
out there to explain whether or not those Gmail messages' content
somehow end up residing on a city server somewhere.  It's been a few
years since I had this conversation with IT.)  And I think that
incorporating your title into your email address might help address the
credibility concern.

In this state, disclosure under our right-to-know law generally applies
to "public records" and/or to "records stored on a public computer" --
not necessarily to "files" created by a government PC.  I am not a
lawyer and there are a lot of gray areas in our right-to-know law that
are still subject to interpretation by the Courts.  However, I would
argue that association work (not pertaining to the operations of the
government) which was conducted during regular work hours (with the
employer's approval) would not be a public record and would not be
subject to disclosure as long as the files are not housed on a public
computer.  Therefore, consider purchasing your own CD's and burn your
association work to those personal CD's (not government-supplied CD's).

I have done association work for quite a number of years and began this
practice some time ago, in part because my user profile wouldn't allow
me to store my municipal work along with all the huge association files
I was accumulating in publications, Powerpoint presentations, PDFs, etc.
So I would either burn those association files to a CD or email the
files to myself from one Gmail account to another Gmail account, and
download them on my Apple at home.  Over time, the practice became
habit.

As others have already written, the subleties of right-to-know and other
disclosure laws vary from state-to-state, and Court interpretations of
those laws in one state are not necessarily applicable to another state.
Unfortunately, the gray areas are usually only clarified once a Court
has been asked to intervene.

At the very least, consider changing your work processes to establish
some "dividers" between your association work and the government
network. (By the way, I liked your term, "Access-to-Information Creep."
Nice description of the trend.)

Paul Bergeron
Nashua, NH


-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Carolyn Heald
Sent: Friday, May 01, 2009 8:42 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [RM] Personal records at work

Perhaps I should clarify my original concern about the Ontario order.
It's not that an employee should expect "personal" communciations sent
or received on an employer's assets to be private; I agree that the
employer has a reasonable right of access.  It's that the general public
now has a right of access under access to information legislation to
records of entities that wouldn't normally be subject to such law.

For example, I'm the General Editor of Archivaria, the scholarly journal
of the Association of Canadian Archivists.  My employer has given me a
certain amount of time to do some of this work at the office because it
supports the academic mandate of the university.  I use my York
University email address because it adds to my credibility.  I don't
care that my employer can see what I'm up to with the journal.  I don't
care that the IT folks can read my emails.  What I care about is that
anyone now can make an access to information request specifically to
gain access to Archivaria records which are not normally under the
purview of the access legislation.  Now supposing someone made such a
request, it's unlikely they would get many of the records because (a)
the ACA as the third party would object, and (b) there are various
exemptions in the legislation that could be used to restrict access.
But it would use up a lot of the university's resources having to
process such a request, and it would be a drain on the professional
association's scant resources as well.

So in my mind, this isn't a privacy issue--it's about access to
information creep.
 
Carolyn Heald | Director, Records and Information Management |
Information and Privacy Office | York University | 4700 Keele Street,
N945 Ross | Toronto, ON  M3J 1P3 | 416 736-2100, ext 20398 



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