Email Privacy

If you want privacy, don't count on email. Here's why.

Email may feel like a private, one-to-one conversation safe from prying eyes, but email is about as confidential as whispering at the White House. Your messages can be intercepted and read anywhere in transit, or reconstructed and read off of backup devices, for a potentially infinite period of time.

If you're sending email at work, your boss can legally monitor it, and if your company becomes involved in a lawsuit, your adversary has the legal right to review it. If you send email from home, anonymous hackers can intercept it, and if you are suspected of a crime, law enforcement officials with a warrant can seize your electronic correspondence. Even your Internet service provider may legally be able to scrutinize your email.

What all this amounts to is simple: Unless you take affirmative steps to encrypt your messages -- a process that uses sophisticated software to garble your words and then allow the recipient to unscramble and read them -- don't count on email as a confidential method of transmitting information.

A written statement like this, signed by an employee, creates a contract upon which an employer can rely if they want to snoop. Equally important, if a dispute arises over monitoring of email, the employer can point to the signed statement to show that it was unreasonable for the employee to think that email was private.

Even if there is no signed agreement or written policy, an employer can still peek into email (or your desk for that matter) -- assuming, as is usually the case, that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy as to the contents. Determining an employee's reasonable privacy expectations is based upon the custom and practice in each particular workplace. What this amounts to is that courts may find that an employee's personal email is private only if the employer has acted in a way that supports this conclusion.

Government employees may have even less privacy when it comes to email. In some cases, the public can obtain access to government employee email under "public record" laws. In one case, a California newspaper was able to obtain all email relating to city business in Menlo Park written over a six-week period under California's Public Record Act. In another matter, an Arizona newspaper was able to obtain backup tapes of a computer server containing email from a local county assessor's office.