Although many companies have employment policies which alert their employees to the non-private nature of their email messages sent through company-owned computers, far fewer address technologies beyond computers, such as mobile phones, pagers and other wireless devices. Likewise, many of these policies fail to cover other means of communication like text and instant messaging.

In City of Ontario v. Quon, the Supreme Court will consider whether a government employer can read text messages sent and received by government employees on employer-owned wireless devices. Despite the City's written policies allowing it to review messages sent using City-owned equipment, the Ninth Circuit found that Sgt. Quon had a reasonable expectation in the privacy of his text messages due to the City's "informal" policy of not reviewing an employee's text messages if the employee paid for overage charges resulting from excessive messaging.