According to information forwarded by the Supreme Court on Monday, it intends ruling, for the first time, on whether right to privacy of the employees can be upheld in a situation wherein they use employer-supplied electronic devices for sending text messages.

The Supreme Court ruling would come in a case filed by Sgt. Jeff Quon and three other officers, who alleged that the Police Department of Ontario, California, had read their personal text messages - some of them sexually explicit – which they had sent and received on pagers given by the department.

The justices of the Supreme Court will be reviewing a ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in San Francisco, which states that by accessing the employees’ text messages on organization-provided devices, the police department had not only violated the privacy rights of the employees, but also “unreasonable” search laws stated by the US Constitution.

Last year, the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals set a precedent by ruling that since the officers had been ‘led to believe’ by a senior that their pagers could be used for personal use, they assumed “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their text messages. 

The decision was welcomed by workplace rights advocates, who now are looking up to the Supreme Court to set new rules for the workplace in public agencies, and possibly even private companies.