Employment Law question

ceridwen

LittleVoice wrote: »

SarEl wrote: »

That would only ensure that the e-mail disappeared without a trace. And no evidence that it had ever existed. Think about it - DPA requests only work if (a) the employer is honest and (b) you know the material exists. How do you request something that you have never seen and don't know exists (unless someone inside told you - and that person is prepared to hold their hand up to knowing it exists and act as a witness as to its existence); and what do you do when they don't disclose it - claim psychic abilities with the IT?/QUOTE]

Quite difficult to erase - it's not just a case of hitting the delete button.
It is not unreasonable for a dismissed employee to believe there would be emails on the system which mention them. I expect there are emails on my employer's email system which mention me by name but I don't know what they say.

I'm no computer expert - VERY far from it...:o

It's my understanding though that it's totally impossible to completely eradicate information from a computers hard drive and that it would be possible for an IT expert to be able to "recover" anything that had ever been done on that computer (hence the necessity to smash a computer hard drive to pieces literally when one gets rid of a computer....). The police, after all, take away computers from suspects in child pornography cases - which presumably have had the incriminating evidence destroyed (hastens to add - the police are quite right too to use every power they have to "nail" people who do awful things like that...).

So - with that - then I am guessing its totally impossible for the employer to eradicate all trace of those emails. The question is though - how you manage to produce them as "evidence" for your friend without risk to yourself? I'm not at all sure that you will be able to find a way...:cool:

DVardysShadow

ceridwen wrote: »

I'm no computer expert - VERY far from it...:o

It's my understanding though that it's totally impossible to completely eradicate information from a computers hard drive and that it would be possible for an IT expert to be able to "recover" anything that had ever been done on that computer (hence the necessity to smash a computer hard drive to pieces literally when one gets rid of a computer....).

Somewhat off topic, but probably useful background. The data on a hard drive is put down at random locations, and these locations are recorded in indexes [the directories you can see]. The locations of the directories are themselves indexed in the directories which contain them. To delete a file or a directory, all that happens is that the location of the information is deleted from the directory. The space is then marked as being free.

This means that data which has been deleted remains available until it is used as free space to store more data at a later time. But once it is overwritten, it is no longer available. It is just about possible to dismantle the drive and infer what has been there previously from the edges of the strips where the data sits on the disk - but this is advanced research lab stuff and not really feasible for a straight civil case.

CupOfChai

To add to DVardysShadow's comments - there are programs available for free online that will overwrite your hard drive with strings of random digits, thus permanently erasing whatever was on there and has been deleted (so it can't then be recovered from the free space, as DVS has said). No need to smash the hard drive to pieces at all.