The Gaming Den

So, I have always been in favor of a company's right to read the e-mails of their employees on the company sever. But recently, a thought occured to me about it. Every day, more and more people switch from standard mail, to electronic mail, and if I were to open up a letter sent to an employee that worked for me, it would be a felony. I guess I was wondering how everyone else felt about the issue, because I'm a little torn on it now.

Corporations should be allowed to monitor an read emails sent to corporate addresses as long it is made unambiguously clear to both employees and anyone sending them emails that they are in the public record. Ideally this would be indicated in the address itself, but it's a bit late for that. This should be true of government correspondence as well. In fact, the emails should all be publicly accessible to any interested party (member of relevant corporation or governance).

Employees also have to be allowed to maintain email addresses which are completely private, but should not be used for official correspondence that belongs in the public record (I'm looking at you, Sarah Palin).

CatharzGodfoot wrote:This should be true of government correspondence as well. In fact, the emails should all be publicly accessible to any interested party (member of relevant corporation or governance).

You can't do this, because many gov. depts. deal with people's personal lives. A person has the right to expect that their emails with their tax details will not become public property.
Likewise, legal advice and sensitive documents are often sent by email and need to remain private.

Check your local privacy laws.
I'm of the opinion that you should not read emails and have company policy to delete them within a few days, to reduce exposure to law suits. Reading and archiving email is just waiting for something embarrassing to come out.

Blasted wrote:

CatharzGodfoot wrote:This should be true of government correspondence as well. In fact, the emails should all be publicly accessible to any interested party (member of relevant corporation or governance).

You can't do this, because many gov. depts. deal with people's personal lives. A person has the right to expect that their emails with their tax details will not become public property.
Likewise, legal advice and sensitive documents are often sent by email and need to remain private.

This is dead on...I work for a state agency, and we get a lot of highly private information sent to us by clients (members of the public) we're trying to serve. All that stuff has to be kept in strictest confidence, and there are some pretty severe penalties for failing to do so.

I'm of the opinion that you should not read emails and have company policy to delete them within a few days, to reduce exposure to law suits. Reading and archiving email is just waiting for something embarrassing to come out.

This, on the other hand, does not work for us...because by statute, we have to keep everything case-related (including emails, if they pertain to a case) for seven years...in case it is relevant to a future court proceeding or formal hearing.

It probably is good policy to delete as much as possible, and (if feasible) convert it to a more formal memorandum (rather than keeping the original email) for the file, if you need to keep such things.

KaNT wrote:So, I have always been in favor of a company's right to read the e-mails of their employees on the company sever. But recently, a thought occured to me about it. Every day, more and more people switch from standard mail, to electronic mail, and if I were to open up a letter sent to an employee that worked for me, it would be a felony. I guess I was wondering how everyone else felt about the issue, because I'm a little torn on it now.

We have to keep those records in case someone submits a Right To Information request. Since the government email system is run on tax dollars we also have to make sure its used appropriately, so email is subject to being read.

PoliteNewb is spot on. Extra bonus notice, never send anything to a government agency that you wouldn't want turning up in an investigation. Everything that makes it past the spam filters is recorded prior to it reaching the employee. Even if they delete it without reading it theres a copy. My understanding is that US agencies have similar requirements and systems.

It would be nice if corporate email policies were made abundantly clear to some of the old guard. It makes me laugh when some chick in her 50s saves every work email she's ever received because she thinks trading scrap-booking ideas with someone the next office over is inexplicably subject to HIPAA compliance.

And here I thought scrap- booking was handled by FISMA

Corporate emails belong to the corporation. Someone who sends private emails using their corporate email address is an idiot. You should have your own private email address for private emails. And be sure to read them in an encrypted client. Or better yet, don't read them from work, Corporations often sniff packets at the firewall level.

Does this means that emails sent using a gmail address do belong to Google ?
I mean, of course Google knows everything about its users, so why not the content their private emails.

Falgund wrote:Does this means that emails sent using a gmail address do belong to Google ?
I mean, of course Google knows everything about its users, so why not the content their private emails.

Depends on the contract you have with Google. They can establish whatever terms of service they want.

Falgund wrote:Does this means that emails sent using a gmail address do belong to Google ?
I mean, of course Google knows everything about its users, so why not the content their private emails.

My guess is that if someone leaned on Google hard enough, they would be both willing and able to supply those emails, and it's entirely possible a court would back them up as having the right to do so.

Email is not the USPS. There is no inherent expectation of privacy, as far as I'm aware...even if it may be implied and for the most part de facto. Whether or not it's de jure...I have no idea. Read the TOS with a fine tooth comb, or better yet, have a lawyer do it for you.

we obviously need to nationalize google

US Judges have already ruled that email on a 3rd party mail system can be obtained through a subpoena to that 3rd party, and there is no need to serve the primary, or even inform them of the subpoena.

sabs wrote:US Judges have already ruled that email on a 3rd party mail system can be obtained through a subpoena to that 3rd party, and there is no need to serve the primary, or even inform them of the subpoena.

Under a Patriot Act request, the police can just get your email without a judge.

It's supposed to be for terrorism, but the cops use it for basically everything because there is no oversight and no penalties for abusing it.

That being said, most companies simply provide electronic records when asked. They really don't care about you and assume (correctly) that the cops will protect them from privacy laws. This is how all the warrant-less wiretapping was done in the Bush-era before the Patriot Act was passed, and it's been the model ever since.

Basically, never do anything online that you don't want the government to know about.

Corporate emails are controlled by the corporation. I think that in theory everything you do with your work email is supposed to be work-related and therefore the corporation has every right to read it. As a practical matter the fact that they run the server the email resides on means they can read it at any time they feel like.

Also, corporations and government agencies should archive every email for some reasonably long period because responding to a legal inquiry about possible misconduct by saying you deleted a bunch of your email because it was unimportant looks incredibly shifty. After all, once the email is deleted there's no way to prove anything about its contents, so deleting it could potentially qualify as destroying evidence. There's no real reason to store it on an actual computer, though. Keep an email archive in the same manner as backups and you should be fine.

PoliteNewb wrote:

Falgund wrote:Does this means that emails sent using a gmail address do belong to Google ?
I mean, of course Google knows everything about its users, so why not the content their private emails.

My guess is that if someone leaned on Google hard enough, they would be both willing and able to supply those emails, and it's entirely possible a court would back them up as having the right to do so.

Email is not the USPS. There is no inherent expectation of privacy, as far as I'm aware...even if it may be implied and for the most part de facto. Whether or not it's de jure...I have no idea. Read the TOS with a fine tooth comb, or better yet, have a lawyer do it for you.

Well, that's not entirely true. You do get some expectation of privacy, because the right to privacy is a constitutional right, "the First Amendment has a penumbra where privacy is protected from governmental intrusion." This is because of "penumbras, formed by emamanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance" (per Griswald v. Connecticut). It's a great outcome, but a really, really terrible reason.

Your email on gmail is technically private for 90 days. After that mail that has not been retrieved is much easier to get with no warrent. This is a throwback to the days when you actually downloaded your email and it was removed from the email server.

fectin wrote:Well, that's not entirely true. You do get some expectation of privacy, because the right to privacy is a constitutional right, "the First Amendment has a penumbra where privacy is protected from governmental intrusion." This is because of "penumbras, formed by emamanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance" (per Griswald v. Connecticut). It's a great outcome, but a really, really terrible reason.

And that would matter at all if anybody at all actually used Griswold to determine what they should do in a privacy case, specifically the penumbra's part of it, that has been completely ignored as a justification in every single case since Griswold.