Please make the correction! Business Law Make sure you understand the case

Business Law

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Introduction

Senators Richard Blumenthal and Charles Schumer in 2012 sent letters to the justice department and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission urging them to conduct federal investigations into the legality of requiring job applicants to divulge their passwords and usernames for email websites and social networking as a requirement to get hired (Miller, 2014). The reports, which indicated that employers in the country demanded private information among applicants of job as part of the process of the interview is what prompted the letters. Social media provides platforms which are very useful for employers and job applicants to interact. At times they are used as a means through which employers can discover the unfavorable materials which can make prospects of employment fatal. Thus the accessibility and prevalence of social media have made online background checks a common practice among prospective employees.

In Pietrylo v. Hillstone Restaurant Group, the plaintiff Pietrylo accused the employer of accessing a MySpace chat group that the plaintiff maintained during his non-working hours. The issue of the case was that the restaurant through one of the employees in the group managed to gain access of the chat group whereby the manager shared the information to the regional manger which led to two employees being fired. The two employees them resulted to sue the company for the violation of the SCA Act and the New Jersey Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Control Act (Clarkson, 2014).

The rule of law under SCA Act addresses compelled and voluntary disclosure of stored electronic and wire communications and transactional records held by a third party internet service provider. This means that all their information should be kept private and no one should access their protected information without their consent. The defendants’ argument was that since St. Jean who is said to have reported the existence of the group to the Hillstone manager was an authorized user, and then there is no liability under the statutes based on the exception (Miller, 2014). Besides that, in the freedom of speech part, the defendant also argued that the company was a private employer not a state actor and so the constitutional obligations can only be directed at state action. In addition to that, they argued that even if the plaintiffs were employees in the public sector, their speech is not protected since it did not talk about a public concern issue. The defendant hence suggested that occasional reference to minimum wages was not sufficient grounds to show that the speech the plaintiffs exercised in the chat group was a matter of public concern.

Furthermore, they pointed out the undisputed fact that most of the posts in the chat group included derogatory remarks on both the management and the customers in reference to drug abuse which is a bad thing for them to do. As for the invasion of privacy which was among the counts on the restaurant, the defendant argued that the plaintiffs failed to identify public policy source which underlie the claim. Besides that, it was not yet established whether or not St. Jean voluntarily provided authorization for the defendant to gain accesses to the group information. For the count of violation of common law tort, the defendants argued that St. Jean authorized the viewing of the website since she was an authorized user of the group chat. Besides that most of the information on the group was public hence there was no privacy intrusion (Clarkson, 2014).

References

Clarkson, K. W., Miller, R., & Cross, F. (2014). Business law: Text and cases.

Miller, R. L. R., & Cross, F. (2014). The legal environment of business.