A new ruling from a federal appeals court in California could prevent employers from monitoring text messages on mobile devices given to employees for business.

Per the judgment from the San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, employers must have a warrant or the employee's permission to see text messages that aren't stored by the employer or by a company that the employer pays for storage.

The decision was handed down in a case titled Quon v. Arch Wireless. Police officers in the Southern California city of Ontario alleged that the police department illegally examined text messages they sent from work-issued pagers.

The Ontario police department was trying to gauge how much money Sergeant Jeff Quon ought to pay for personal text messages sent on the mobile device. Mr. Quon is a member of the department's SWAT team.

In their case, the officers said that the department shouldn't have viewed the messages without their approval or a court order -- an argument upheld by the appellate court.

This argument was based on current legal distinctions between service providers being paid for storage of messages and those that aren't paid for this service.

The Ninth Circuit said the police officers had a reasonable expectation of privacy in their text messages since the Ontario police department had an informal policy of not monitoring text messages that were paid for by employees.

In fact, the court said the department's search violated the plaintiffs' constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures -- a defense of the Fourth Amendment, in other words.

Companies typically store corporate email on their own servers or server space that they rent and which they control. But hosting of text messages has been farmed out to third-parties.

The appellate court said that employers have access to text messages because they're stored by third-parties. However, the Ninth Circuit court posited that the storage was incidental, with greater privacy protections applying since employers are paying only for messaging services.

Now it's not clear what rights employers have when an employee splits the bill for a work-issued mobile device, which is done in many cases. There, the employee might simply refuse to give employers complete access to the text messages since some may not be business-related.

So given this hand, what should employers using the mobile channel for communication purposes do?

Employers should be explicit in their privacy policies and reserve the right to read text messages and email. This way they can have access to communications that are under their physical control and those that aren't.

These written agreements should cover employees' work-issued mobile phones and pagers and the messages that are sent or received through those devices.

This course of action is the best way to avoid future lawsuits between employers and employees.

In this highly competitive era, it pays to respect the consumer's right to privacy as much as the employer's right to know how its work-issued communications tools are used to represent the brand or corporation.

Please click here for the copy of the Quon v. Arch Wireless judgment issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit