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.
Email at Work
On your first day of a new job, you may be asked to sign and acknowledge some form of employer email policy. This policy will probably inform you that email is to be used only for everyday business purposes, that the computer systems at work are the property of your employer, that email may be monitored, and that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your use of email.
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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.
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