Let's suppose you go on a vacation to New Zealand and you decide to email pictures of your amazing surfing skills to a friend who works at, say, some company in Ohio. Your email does not concern your friend's work or his company's business. It is not an emergency email, nor is it even a request for a ride to your house from the airport. Your email concerns your surfing skills! Even worse, your email is not just a few sentences that would consume a little file space.

Rather, your email contains a dozen pictures, and, without noticing it, you sent very high-quality pictures that were 6.2 megabytes in size, each. "Come on," you're saying, "give me a break! What's the matter with an email and some pictures? It's me surfing, it's not some weird pornographic material." Maybe you're right; maybe it's not a big deal. But consider the resources you've consumed by sending that email: Your message, over 60 megabytes of it, traveled over the Internet to your friend's company's ISP.

The packets of the email and picture were then transmitted to the company's router and from that router to its email server. Your message consumed processing cycles on the router and on the email server computer.

A copy of your picture was then stored on that email server until your friend deleted it, perhaps weeks later. Additionally, your friend will use his computer and the company LAN to download the pictures to his desktop computer, where they will be stored. In fact, the entire computing infrastructure, from the ISP to your friend's desk, is owned, operated, and paid for by your friend's employer.

Finally, if your friend reads his email during his working hours, he will be consuming company resources-his time and attention, which the company has paid for while he is at work. [Update: 2008] Since this guide was written, the situation has become even more complicated.

Now, in addition to (or instead of) emailing pictures, you're likely to be updating your Facebook page with the photos, and your friend is likely using his computer to view those photos and to comment on your page and to update his. Now, the pictures are no longer stored on the company's servers, but they are still being transmitted over its data communications network.

[Update: 2010] Since the 2008 update was written, personal, intelligent devices like the iPhone, the iPad, and Windows 7 Series phones, not to mention BlackBerry phones, have become affordable and popular. Consequently, your friend can choose to read your Facebook page, tweets, and so on from his phone or iPad.

If his device connects to his company's LAN, then he is still using the company's data communications network. However, if that phone makes a WAN wireless connection, then he is no longer using any of his company's data communications network. He is, however, using company time.

Discussion Questions

1. Is it ethical for you to send the email and picture to your friend at work?

2. Does your answer to question 1 change depending on the size of the pictures? Does your answer change if you send 100 pictures? If you send 1,000 pictures? If your answer does change, where do you draw the line?

3. Once the pictures are stored on the company's email server, who owns the pictures? Who controls those pictures? Does the company have the right to inspect the contents of its employees' mailboxes? If so, what should managers do when they find your picture that has absolutely nothing to do with the company's business?

4. What do you think is the greater cost to your friend's company: the cost of the infrastructure to transmit and store the email or the cost of the time your friend takes at work to read and view your pictures? Does this consideration change any of your answers above?

5. How does the 2008 update change the ethics of the situation? Is it ethical for your friend to read and update Facebook using the company's computers?

6. How does the 2010 update change the ethics of the situation? Is it any of the company's business what your friend does with his iPhone or other device at work?

7. Describe a reasonable policy for computer/phone/ communicating device use at work. Consider email, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as the 2008 and 2010 updates. Try to develop a policy that will be robust in the face of likely data communication changes in the future.