what rights do i have?

i need to ask a little help.

say someone was just terminated from his/her job :( and that person has data on a computer that he/she would like to optain. the general manager will not let the person to obtain the data. none of the data is illegal: installation files for network tools, a few personal pictures of my cats and construction to my house and many mp3s that i downloaded from emusic, for which i pay monthly.

i will do nothing illegal, but what are my rights in obtaining that data? like i said, the GM wont let me get them, saying that it is on company property. but so was my coffee mug, does she get that too?

please help me. i'm at my wits end right now and am having a hard time with even a simple google ssearch.

Quote:

---

Originally posted here by qwerty_smith
i need to ask a little help.

---

I think you have clearly illustrated the importance of backups, and having copies on floppy or cd, especially of personal data on company machines that you may want to keep. I know from personal experiece how easy it is to get lazy or sloppy with backups, until as you know , you require the material. I'm sure even seasoned IT professionals would admit to the occassional mishap over the years, but back to your problem, I think maybe your only hope at this stage would be to ask, plead or beg with tears in your eye's and rely on a bit of charity from your GM

Generally speaking...there is no expectaion of privacy at the work place. Most companies have a computer use policy that is signed when a person starts to work for them and sometimes that is renewed once or twice a year. In effect, anything on your workstation belongs to the company, not you. However, there may be a few things you can try:

1. If you left on good terms, even if you were fired, you may ask that after they have checked out your workstation if you can get a copy of all non-work related files.
2. If they never had you sign an acceptable computer use policy, or there is no documentation concerning the disposition of non-work realted items on a company workstation, you may be able to get some help from an attorney, but I would not hold my breath.

Most companies are leary about allowing a terminated employee access to anything dealing with company computers for obvious reasons. Where I work, when an employee is termed, his badge is disactivated, he his handed his termed paperwork and he is escorted out of the building / property and we search his workstation and read all of the network logs to track his movments over a certain timeframe. This allow us to protect the companies assets. We had one person, who was being escorted out, try to delete items off his workstation. We ended up having to remove him bodily from the building. The funny thing is, there was nothing on his system that was deemed a problem so we are not sure what he was trying to do. Of course we were able to restore the deleted files.

So , in short, there is not much you can do. In the future, keep only work related files on your workstation. Do not surf the net. Only view sites that are work related. One of the things I have seen happen is, when a company needs to chop a few heads in order to keep their numbers up, they will look at Internet usage logs and check for non work realted files. If they find any, they can and will fire you for non compilance. Believe me...it happens.

Hope this helps.

thanks. thats kind of what i figured. i was pretty messed up this morning.

well, i'm over it. new job, brighter future, blah blah.

thanks for the responses.