Messaging and notices

Arbeidsmiljøloven § 9-5 — the employer’s access to an employee’s mailboxNorwegian law tightly restricts an employer’s access to an employee’s electronic communication. So there is no permission in this product — none, at any level, including the company administrator — that grants reading another person’s conversations. It was not left out; it was refused.

Crews already have messaging, and it is WhatsApp. Replacing it is not the goal and would not work. What this module is for is the class of message that has to be on the record: a bridge order, a notice from the office that people are required to have read, a message to a position rather than to a person.

And it is for the two things a consumer messenger cannot do: reach exactly the people who are currently embarked, and count acknowledgements against the version of a notice that was in force when each person read it.

• No permission reads another person’s conversation. There is no administrative override, no support view and no export that includes it. A test in the domain package asserts the absence, so it cannot be added by accident.
• A directory that knows the ship. Search by name, by rank or by department, and the result is the people on this vessel now — not a company phone book of eight hundred names.
• One conversation per pair. Two people have one thread, ever. There is no way to start a second one that splits the history in half.
• Audiences that mean something. A message can be addressed to a department, a shift, a set of positions, a vessel, a fleet or the company — and a broadcast to the vessel reaches the embarked crew, not everybody who has ever sailed on her.
• Notices as living documents. A notice has a version chain. When it is amended, the acknowledgement count resets for the people the change affects and the previous version stays readable.
• Bridge orders, signed. Standing orders and night orders are written, signed with a drawn or PIN signature, and read by the watch with the reading recorded.

• Messages — the inbox and the directory
• Notices — what the office has published and who has acknowledged it
• Bridge orders — standing and night orders, signed and read

Being asked for an administrator who can read the crew’s messages is a matter of when, not whether. The answer is no, and it will stay no: a messenger the crew believes is being read is a messenger the crew does not use, and then the bridge orders go unread too because nobody opens the app.

If a company genuinely needs lawful access to an employee’s communication, Norwegian law sets out how — and it does not run through a vendor’s admin panel.