Email Privacy

The assumption is that your email is your business. Nobody else should be able to legally intercept it or read it without your consent.

Unfortunately, that is not necessarily the case.

Up until very recently, many U.S. companies and ISP providers would not think of snooping in your email. After all, it would violate U.S. Federal Wiretap laws. Those laws strictly prohibited anyone from intercepting communications without court authorization. This included email, voicemail messages and internet tracking.

There was a U.S. ruling that dismissed charges against someone who was charged with violation of the wiretap laws.

That case was against the owner of a rare and used book company.

The defendant was intercepting and copying emails being sent to his members from Amazon.com. Basically he was snooping on his members emails for his companies own gain.

When the Federal court ruled that he was not violating the Wiretap laws, this destroyed many of the perceived restrictions that were holding companies back from doing similar snooping.

What To Do

Its important to realize that your emails are not as secure as you might think they are.

Hopefully it won't be the case, but this ruling could have some ugly consequences. That is companies may feel nothing is stopping them from doing the same with your emails.

It is essential for companies to update their privacy policies on their sites.

They should explain exactly what type of monitoring (if any) they will be doing. They should set their customers minds at ease if they never have any intention of invading their privacy in such a manner.

For you as an end user of the site, it is a good policy to assume that a site could read through your emails. It probably isn't the case, but if you assume it could be happening, then you are ahead of the game.

This will be interesting to see how this develops.