Email Privacy IssuesEssay title: Email Privacy IssuesEmail Privacy IssuesAs a result of recent lawsuits against many organizations, companies have developed a policy on proper email practices on company computers. No longer is your personal email regarded as private when accessed on a company’s computer. Companies, in order to decrease lawsuits and increase productivity, have purchased email monitoring software to track email usage during work hours. Therefore, with the onslaught of email monitoring, is a private email really private?
In NetworkWorld’s The Perils of Privacy, Sharon Gaudin discusses the benefits of a company having a well-defined email policy. She provides the pros and cons of whether a company should invest in an email monitoring system. According to Gaudin, companies are held liable for what their employees do when using company equipment. A joke between to college buddies can be deemed sexual harassment by the company and open up a lawsuit if it ends up in the wrong hands. Because of this, companies have begun monitoring not only emails that employees send, but the websites they visit. Is this ethical? Some would say yes. A company has to protect its name and assets. The business arena is just for that…business. Employees are not paid to do personal business on company time. Leisure activity on the internet slows productivity and costs money.
The Guardian, 3 November 2014. [3]
A few things are obvious: Facebook’s Privacy Policy makes no mention of an email, and it doesn’t mention an email list. It doesn’t even add anything to information about the social activity that people use to get in touch or share with friends.
In a June 2012 post, Gaudin said that she would take a few steps towards creating the email security for her company’s site: (i) make one where emailing uses data that doesn’t include data from email providers, (ii) develop one in which the content is encrypted and a system of user ID (email addresses in the user ID is optional so people can see your messages on your site); (iii) work on an ecommerce program that does all the emailing and the emailing metadata, which could be included in the ecommerce program and stored on a server somewhere in the home.
A company would have to maintain separate, publicly available policies for the different categories of the user and the email addresses in their database, and a company could only ask for those specific kinds of information. The latter would be protected under the Privacy Act, a requirement that the company have. (In fact, several years ago, the US Justice Dept. stated that such an agreement should be struck. But because the Privacy Act already requires that information be shared publicly, a company could still have a hard time getting access to it in the future.)
Facebook has a policy barring public disclosure of the information about specific user information, including Facebook user id.
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A few minutes after this post came out, an email from Gaudin to Mark Zuckerberg seemed to go out. He told Mark to take Facebook down:
So, this is Mark and I talking about it in a private email: 1. A Facebook PR company sent me an email about a Facebook page you were running when we were in the same boat with you. 2. A PR company sent us a security-related email that describes who we will be communicating with in our future. And I asked him to delete it—because it included sensitive information and I don’t think you will like it. 3. He said, “OK, but I’ll delete the email and you can do what you want with it.” 4. So, as part of this plan, he deletes the email and we’re off. That’s in the past.
By early November, a friend of mine contacted me to write to Zuckerberg calling the email a mistake and sending me a screenshot of the message. But I never spoke to him again. So, maybe he’s trying to blame what Gaudin did on Zuckerberg? I don’t know. I wish I could figure that out.