Email privacy (email privacy)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	email privacy
Date:	06/01/01 (4 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: privacy

Disadvantages: can be used for other things, wrong people get punished

The big thing about e-mail privacy today is not what happens to your personal e-mail, but what happens to the stuff you access during wokring hours, especially in your work inbox if you have one.

The big kick up is not about who sends you the offensive e-mail, but whether you have it in your inbox or not. Recently, in the newspapers, and on the television, and in the computer press, it's the recipients of these e-mails that are getting sacked or disciplined for simply knowing people who send this stuff out.

On more than one occaision over the last few months, headlines have been made about the fact that an employee of a company had been suspended / sacked because certain things were found in his / her inbox.

I have no qualms about employees being dealt with if they send unwelcome or offensive e-mails to other employees (or even to other people, if done from their work account, on work time) because that sort of behaviour is not excusable, but I cannot believe for one second that a company has the right to deal with employees that harshly for something that they have no real control over.

The most obvious way out of it, as far as I can see, is to make a clause in the employment contract for anyone who uses e-mail as part of their job, that their e-mail account can be monitored (after all, lots of business mail is pre-opened [and monitored therefore by the mailroom staff of large companies]) so why not inboxes? Then, the employee only gives out his e-mail address to professional contacts (again, part of the contract) which means anything that comes into his or her inbox is the responsibility of the sender, not the recipient.

Obviously, the other big kick up is about what the governments are suposedly doing to monitor the contect of e-mail. This is no different from the paranoia that tells us that the US government has a computer that analyses telephone calls and highlights those which contain certain key words (bomb,drugs,
presidential assassination in Dallas etc.) Well, as far as I'm concerned, as I'm not involved in any illegal activites (apart from that $75 million cocaine shipment to ... nevermind) so if the monitoring is invisible, and I'm not aware of it, it can go ahead if it catches proper criminals and not used for some Big Brother militant police force action.

Make of it what you will...the only people who should be concerned are those with something to hide!

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