Legal Question

[BayAreaPhoneTech]

I have read this before but don't know where to find it in writing, but I need to know what kind of legal troubles our company would be opening ourselves up to if we were to reset the voicemail box for someone where that mailbox does not belong to them.

Are there any provacy laws that prevent companies from resetting the voicemail password for anyone other than the owner of that mailbox?

If you could provide a link or maybe something that your own company has put in place that would help me out a bunch.

Currently I only reset a password if it's the person's mailbox that is requesting it. I will not reset the password of a mialbox that doesn't belong to them.

Am I understanding that right? Thanks.

 

[doktor]

Hi BayAreaPhoneTech

We have a stict company policy in our company.
If a person wants to get reset his/hers password for the voice mailbox, the engineer that will do the reset will call the person to make shure that nothing is done wrong.
If we are doing the voice mailbox password reset job for other companies, their system administrator has the responsibility to make shure that it is the right mailbox which has its password reset.

We have many of these reset cases after holidays.

If an employee is quitting the company, the person s voice mailbox will be deleted, and only if the person is leaving the company.

If we de-install (/remove)a voice mail system from any customer, harrdisks with voice mail messages are destroyed, to make shure that they do not get into the wrong hands.

/doktor

Hope this will help you.

 

[BayAreaPhoneTech]

I am really looking for something that may be more of a law. A lot of companies have similiar policies, but the company I currently work for seems to reset passwords for whomever asks for whatever mailbox they ask for. I'm trying to make sure they don't leave their a$$ hanging out in the wind and get sued. Thanks for the post though.

Any one else know of any laws that govern this sort of issue? Thanks.

 

[doktor]

Hi BayAreaPhoneTech

I suppose that you are thinking about legal rights in the USA. "Bay Area" is San Francisco, I would guess...
I am situated in Europe, so legal right are different here than in the US of A.
So, instead of asking the politicians in our country, we adapted some kind of "nearly US-like" recommendations (read laws), preventing us from (hopefully) NOT getting sued in any kind of way.
So from any european view, I think, there are no laws or legal recommendation to this subject, just common sense.
Still, the recommendations I wrote earlier, is what we use, every day.
Yours doktor.

 

[KenMeans]

All i know is that some states have laws that cover voicemail and email and some don't. I have never heard of a problem in doing this but you may want look on the FCC web page

 

[kxboy]

I'm not aware of any laws. However, the company probably has a policy about email. I would treat voicemail the same as email. In general, email is the property of the company, and they have the right to look ...read.. whatever anytime. Most companies have employees sign something that covers this.

I'm not a lawyer, however it is my understanding that in cases where personal email was read by others in the company, and there was a good reason, such as suspected fraud, or sometype of wrong doing, the employee does not have any rights. However, the area is a little grey if people are just reading to be nosey.

I have know of companies that have terminated techs that were reading and/or listening to other users email and/or voicemail without a valid reason.

When we get a request to reset a password, we email the new password to the user. That email has a link back to a secure server, where the user has to enter their secure ID and password to get the new password. This should help to reduce the number of invalid password requests. I would sugest that you implement the same or a simular type of system. Or a strong policy about password resets.

For those mailboxes that are shared among several people, for example several people doing the same job at a shipping desk, you can usually set a permanent password that can't be changed. This will eliminate one user changing the password, and then the others can't get in.