Most workers know all too well that anything they write or do on their office computer (including e-mail) is not really private. Some businesses, like Boeing, really go overboard in snooping on their employees, but most companies just don’t put that kind of effort into it.

The general rule is that workers know that anything they do using company equipment can be monitored, but most companies don’t have the time or energy to focus a lot of effort on doing so unless they believe there is a problem. There are exceptions to this, of course, and I worked at one place where the owner of the company was paranoid and set up all sorts of monitoring systems to track employees despite much evidence to show that he didn’t really need to.

The courts have generally come down on the side of employers in these matters, and workers have had little recourse— until now.

“A federal appeals court … sharply limited the ability of employers to obtain e-mails and text messages sent by employees on company-financed accounts,” according to a story in the Los Angeles Times. “The text message portion of the ruling, issued by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals [in San Francisco] will affect all employers who contract with an outside provider for messaging, as most do. Access to e-mail would be barred if the employer contracts out its e-mail service rather than maintaining an internal server to handle it.”

Although this ruling is only applicable to companies operating in the 9th U.S. Circuit (the states of California, Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho, plus Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands), federal appeals court rulings frequently spread because they are cited in cases in other parts of the country. And my feeling is that this ruling has a good chance of eventually ending up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

“This ruling is a tremendous victory for your online privacy, helping ensure that the 4th Amendment applies to your communications online just as strongly as it does to your letters and packages,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that advocates civil liberties in the digital world, said in an online posting cited by the Times.

That may be true, but my sense is that a lot of companies that outsource their e-mail services will try to close the loophole in this one and will bring e-mail in-house. The Times story indicated that a majority of companies keep employee e-mail on their servers already, meaning that the company can continue to monitor it. “Microsoft Corp.’s Outlook program, which has a 65 percent share of the corporate e-mail market, can be used either on a company’s internal systems or on systems managed by vendors,” the Times reported. “Currently, about 28 percent of Outlook users have their e-mail handled by an outside vendor, according to research firm Radicati Group.”

Will this ruling be a major turning point for employees in their right to privacy, or will it be just a small wrinkle that companies will quickly fix? Only time will tell, but one thing is certain: An organization’s ability to monitor its workforce just got a little bit more difficult.