The New York Court of Appeals’ decision in Thyroff recognizing a conversion claim based on a company preventing a former employee from accessing personal information stored on the company’s computer certainly presents some difficult privacy issues for businesses, who already face enough potential legal troubles when terminating employees. You suggested that to avoid infringing on an employee’s privacy rights in electronic data on a business computer, a business could give a terminated employee access to the computer to retrieve their personal information. That may present practical difficulties because that access would have to be supervised or somehow limited to prevent the former employee from gaining access to confidential business information or even, in the worst case, sabotaging the company’s computer. Do you have any other ideas on how a business might protect its former employee’s privacy rights and avoid potential tort liability?
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