ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, March 9, 1996 TAG: 9603110086
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ROCHESTER, N.Y.
SOURCE: BEN DOBBIN ASSOCIATED PRESS
A VOICE-MAIL PRIVACY issue is unresolved as a couple's lawsuit is settled out of court.
Lisa Huffcut found out about her husband's affair by listening to his office voice mail. His boss at a McDonald's restaurant, she said, intercepted the steamy messages and had them played back to her.
The results were two-edged. The two-month liaison ended and the marriage stayed intact. But Michael Huffcut, believing his privacy rights had been violated, confronted his employer and was promptly fired.
Now, more than a year later, the epilogue: The Huffcuts, who each sued for $1 million, have reached an out-of-court settlement. Terms were not disclosed.
``The case has been resolved to the satisfaction of Mr. and Mrs. Huffcut'' was all their lawyer, Raymond M. Schlather, would say Friday.
But left unresolved, according to experts, is a right-of-privacy vs. right-to-monitor controversy at a time when voice mail and e-mail have quickly become commonplace in the American workplace.
The lawsuit might have helped determine whether conversations recorded in electronic voice mail boxes are granted the same confidentiality protections as live telephone calls or postal mail.
It also promised to define the scope of employers' rights in eavesdropping at work for ``quality assurance'' or other business reasons.
``We'll have to wait for another case to come along, and there is no case in the courts that I know of,'' said Robert Ellis Smith, publisher of Privacy Journal, a monthly newsletter based in Providence, R.I.
Along with his wife, Huffcut sued McDonald's Corp.; Harry Harvey III, a fellow McDonald's supervisor who was a family friend; and longtime employer Fred Remillard, who operates 12 McDonald's franchises in western New York.
The couple maintained that voice-mail messages are protected by the 1968 federal wiretap law and a 1986 amendment, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and that Remillard intentionally inflicted emotional anguish, embarrassment and loss of reputation and income.
McDonald's has maintained that the monitoring was carried out for ``legitimate business purposes.'' The defendants argued that, as a manager, Huffcut should have known his boss could gain access to his voice mail and, as a result, had no expectation of privacy.
Nicholas D'Ambrosio Jr., the lawyer for McDonald's, and Edward Hooks, the lawyer for Remillard, did not return telephone calls Friday.
The defendants wanted the settlement kept secret. But a federal judge in Rochester required public notice that the case was resolved, even though details of the settlement were not disclosed.
Huffcut, now 42, joined McDonald's out of high school and worked his way up to regional supervisor in Elmira. Rose Hasset was one notch below store manager in a McDonald's in Binghamton, 60 miles away, when their dalliance turned serious in fall 1993.
To fill the void between their get-togethers, they left romantic messages for each other on their voice mail at work.
The lawsuit alleged that Harvey intercepted the messages and transmitted them to Remillard's voice mail. It claimed Harvey, at his boss' direction, played a tape of the messages for Lisa Huffcut in December 1993.
When Huffcut found out, he confronted Remillard about the propriety of his action, arguing that he had been told his voice mail was private. Remillard fired him. Hasset, meanwhile, was promoted to store manager at a Binghamton McDonald's, a post she still holds.
With counseling, the Huffcuts' 15-year marriage has survived. They have since moved away from New York with their two children, and Huffcut has gotten a better-paying management job.
LENGTH: Medium: 72 linesby CNB