Unauthorized Dropbox Access Could Make Employer Liable (1)

A Pennsylvania woman can go forward with her lawsuit alleging her public employer illegally accessed her personal photos through her work computer and disseminated them to justify her discharge, a federal judge ruled.

Elizabeth Frankhouser can proceed with her Fourth Amendment claim because “she alleges that she never ‘housed any of her personal files nor accessed any’” through her government employers’ computers and servers, Judge Kim R. Gibson said. Frankhouser worked for the Clearfield County Career & Technology Center in Clearfield, Pa.

The case raises a novel question of whether public workers retain their constitutional privacy rights to documents and ...