The Supreme Court this week said it will decide a case involving the privacy of an individual's communications made from an employer-issued device that could dictate employees' privacy rights going forward.

According to an article in the Washington Post, the case involves a California police officer who was given a pager for work use and claims his privacy was violated because his employer read personal text messages that he had sent from the device - some of which included sexually explicit content in texts to his girlfriend. A federal appeals court in California found in favor of the police officer, but a written dissent has attracted the interest of the Supreme Court.