UK - Email to be read by anyone other than recipitant

[KARLB]

If i posted a letter through royal mail, it passes from my hands to the post box, then in turn to the postman, in the bag, through the workshop and then into the hands of someone to carry it on a plane and vice versa from there to the recipitant.
- IF ANYONE HAD OPENED MY LETTER EXCEPT THE INTENDED RECIPITANT, IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A CRIME.

But it this only because it's a regulated service in the name of the royals?

If the same was to be proposed in the same manner in e-mails, it would be illegal to read my mail passing through the server, and if anyone such as " Mr. Admin" read my mail, it would be against the law.

Is this true? Or is my invision of privacy a non-unlawful act?

Any info would be thanked, sorry if this has been posted before.

Karlb

 

[PerryMc]

I don't know what the current state of play is as far as laws go. Obviously, in this day and age, they need to be agreed internationally.

As to someone reading emails addressed to you, I think that depends on where you receive them. If they are addressed to you at your work, then theoretically they should be work related so your employer should be entitled to read them. Some products (eg. MailMarshal) filter emails, so the software is 'reading' them, is that ok? If they don't pass the rulesets they get blocked and stored. The MailMarshal administrator pretty much has to read them to ascertain whether they should be forwarded or not.

Isn't privacy taken too far anyway, if you're not doing anything you feel guilty about, why would you care who knows about it? It allows all the scum, whether they are floating on the top of the pond of humanity or sliming along on the bottom to get away with far too much.

Smile anyway,
Perry.

 

[KARLB]

to be honest, it's not the point of doing it that annoys me.

The thing is, that we have now been cut off from linux.org and a whole RANGE of places, and the limited places we are allowed to view are like our own website.
Cameras are everywhere (which i can imagine - i would) and e-mail is monitored also.

I'm trying to set myself up to completely bypass the open eyes of everyone step by step. Mail, and net access.

And when i become the big bad administrator, i'll know how to stop people like myself

I wouldnt mind, but sometimes, everyone want a bit of privacy.

The other day, one of us wanted to sent a letter to a company for insurance on one of our cars. Found it the following day opened an tipped on his desk. Cos he used their envelope.

Petty no?

i am in quite a boring job, but like to spend the day on sites (such as this) learning stuff.
This will be stopped soon, as "it's nothing to do with work".

 

[SteveTheGeek]

KarlB,
What's your employment contract say?
-Steve

 

[KARLB]

Hasn't been one that i have signed.

 

[KARLB]

only been here 3-4 months.

 

[DonQuichote]

For who's interested:

There was some discussion in thread672-266535

 

[yauncin]

PerryMC wrote:
Isn't privacy taken too far anyway, if you're not doing anything you feel guilty about, why would you care who knows about it? It allows all the scum, whether they are floating on the top of the pond of humanity or sliming along on the bottom to get away with far too much.

What if you have to send non-disclosure information or other legal information. What if you have a proprietary technology and you don't want the world to know your protocols. What if you don't want people to advertise your internet spending habits to the world. There are reasons for email encryption. Personally I rate email with normal mail, and I definitely don't want people to go through my mail.

 

[SteveTheGeek]

I concur with Yauncin. I've heard this "if you're not doing anything wrong, why do you need privacy" argument before, and (at least in the U.S.) it's a completely bogus one. Our system is predicated on the government (and indeed any organization or individual) being granted permission to intrude upon one's privacy in specific ways only by one's prior consent, unless there is a specific reason to usurp that (i.e. a search warrant or a court-ordered phone tap, or a business monitoring their employees' emails after notifying the employees). Sure it makes it easier for scum to break the law - but at least that George Bush or Bill Clinton joke I just emailed to my friends isn't getting me thrown into that "scum category" by the FBI after it popped up in their Carnivore/DCS1000 system.
-Steve

 

[KARLB]

That's also to say, that we are UNTRUSTED employees.

I will not dig further down this route, as i feel at the end of it, there is no law on my side, and no ethical outcrys are gonna change anything.

We will all have to accept, that privacy (no matter how private) will remain while in the employees time to be read at their discression.

No worries. I'll just unplug the server on my way out

 

[SteveTheGeek]

KarlB,
A few points, and mindful that I'm not a lawyer and only experienced with US work environments.
First, my understanding is that (snail)mail coming to you at your place of work, if it references the company, is also legally "openable", also provided that the employer has notified you of this preferably in writing.
Second, a private contract is a private contract, and an employment contract is a private contract. The employer could specify in that contract that you be monitored while in the restroom. Likely? No. But if you sign the contract, you abide by the terms. IMHO, it's their mail server, it's their PC, and they're paying you to work for them, so it's not out of bounds for them to (again, having notified you or specified in policies beforehand) monitor your usage of their equipment during the time they're paying you to work for them. You want to surf for non-job-related reasons, pay for an ISP at home.
Third, without you having signed anything relative to employment or office policies, both you and they are on really shaky legal ground. You probably could reasonably look at legal action. To be using video surveillance, web, mail, and email monitoring with no policy guidelines in place is complete madness. (And yeah, I can't imagine very good reasons to block linux.org either.)
-Steve

 

[Schroeder]

I believe that there was a time when the notion of being watched went strongly against human nature. A sense of privacy seems to be a fundamental need for self-aware beings such as humans. I can't help but take issue with comments like PerryMC's. Would it not make you uncomfortable to have someone following you around all day just watching what you are doing? This is why we teach our children not to stare at other people.
Certainly having your email monitored is a long way from Orwell's Big Brother but I feel that every step towards it should be resisted as much as possible. As soon as we are comfortable with one step, the next step becomes easier to swallow. Most people, myself included, are already fairly comfortable with the knowledge that between credit card records, internet log files and other such things, their entire life story could be reconstructed down to alarming level of detail. We're ripe for the next step.

 

[sleipnir214]

As I see it, the problem is that we have come to expect too much privacy. I'd like to know when, at any time in human history, that we could expect to not be watched when doing anything in a public place? We are a tribal species. We have always and will always interfere in each other's business.

What reasonable expectation of privacy does anyone have on any public street? I'd say none, and anyone who has ever been rousted from a Lover's Lane by a cop can only agree with me. Since our invention of language, human beings have acted under the supposition that anything they do in public might be watched. And talked about.

So many people confuse privacy with anonymity. They think that just because a cop doesn't often look at them, he should never look at them.


And an email message cannot be compared to a letter. It is best compared to a postcard. Like a postcard, an email has no envelope -- it's contents are readily visible to anyone who looks. Sure, you're going to be pissed when you see your letter carrier reading the postcard that your brother sent you from the Bahamas before he puts it in your mailbox. But you had no real expectation of privacy. The text of the letter is right out there for God and everybody to see.

In any regard your letter, too, has no real expectation of privacy. At least in the United States, a postmaster or postal inspector has the right and obligation to examine any piece of mail that passes through his post office. And anything he finds can be used against you in a court of law.


Now, I'm not saying that, for example, what the FBI is trying to do with Carnivore is right, nor am I saying it's wrong. I'm just saying that the assumption of universal privacy as axiomatic is incorrect. Privacy is not an intrinsic property of being human -- it is, rather, something that you must earn and work at to keep.


Network limits and surveillance in the workplace? Who pays for the internet connection? Who pays you for the hours you are there, with your tacit permission that within reason they can tell you what to do? Who decides what is and is not productive use of time you are selling to the company?

Working at a company is a simple transaction: you are trading your time for something else of value, usually money. If you want to sell your time to the company, the company must agree that you have made productive use of it. If the company does not think that you have done with your time is valuable, it will not pay for it.

And KARLB, I'm going to let you in on a little secret: Your company doesn't have to let you access the internet at all.

If you think that visiting linux.org is a valuable use of time you are selling to your company, debate the issue with those in your company that disagree. (And I said "debate", not "argue". There is a difference) Find enough evidence that the information provided there is useful to the company, and I'll wager a small amount of money that they'll let you have access to it again. ______________________________________________________________________
Don't say thanks. Just award stars.
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[Schroeder]

sleipnir214, you make a good point about the difference between privacy and anonymity. I guess I would point out the difference between chance interaction and having your actions actively recorded for later scrutiny.
Even given my rant on personal privacy, I agree that a company has a right to maintain and monitor their employees interactions while on the clock. I'm of the school that if you don't like your employer's behavior, have one of sleipnir214's debates with them or quit.

 

[sleipnir214]

I don't see a difference between the two, other than the legal admissibility as evidence of the latter. ______________________________________________________________________
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[sleipnir214]

[dratted "enter" key]

Once, of course, that you accept the fact that neither privacy nor anonymity are intrisic properties of humanity. In either case, you have to actively seek it out, and work to maintain it. ______________________________________________________________________
Don't say thanks. Just award stars.
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[Schroeder]

I'm not arguing intrinsic rights. Does a person have an intrinsic right to privacy or anonymity? I don't know. I'm saying it's an intrinsic part of human nature to seek out privacy (and maintain it). Does it not make you uncomfortable to be stared at by someone? I don't know exactly why, but it makes me uncomfortable. I'd wager most people would agree with me. I see having your actions videotaped, your purchases documented and your emails read by third parties to be right along the same lines as being stared at.

 

[sleipnir214]

Schroeder, you've forgotten the other drive of human beings -- that we're social animals. For continuing good mental health, we require the presense of and interaction with our fellow human beings. That drive is always going to conflict with any drive we may have to want privacy. If we were descended from some species which made us the genetic first-cousins of wolverines rather than apes, I could see perhaps you have an arguement. Wolverines are are completely solitary creatures. They only get together to breed.

And don't confuse cultural norms with proof of inherent rights. A person's being made uncomfortable by another's staring is not universal. Here's one site that talks about this:

http://crs.uvm.edu/gopher/nerl/group/b/j/intro.html

Again, I challenge anyone to tell me of any time in the history of our species that we've been able to reasonably expect privacy.
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[Schroeder]

sleipnir. I don't think we're arguing the same point here. I don't really disagree with anything you've said (except that I'm not sure exactly what you meant by "intrinsic properties of humanity&quot. You seem to think I'm arguing that humans have a right to privacy. I'm just saying that, social animals or not, the vast majority of us do desire some degree of privacy in our lives.
When determining what our rights are, we need to consider both our social tendencies as well as our need for privacy (which, I'm a far cry from giving up on). I think it's shortsighted to sell privacy short in favor of an easy solution to social problems. Although, as I said earlier, I respect a company's right to monitor correspondence to and from their organization, I think that should be considered a last resort. I think, too often the more intangible side effects of such policies are ignored in order to implement a quick fix.

 

[sleipnir214]

I think you missed the point of the link in my last post. You asked whether it made me uncomfortable to be stared at. Yeah, it does sometimes.

But you seemed to imply that your (and my) reaction to staring was proof that humans want privacy. I disagree -- as the text in the link will show. Our reactions to staring are cultural, not genetic.


We have never had privacy. Not ever in the history of our species, at least as you seem to be defining it.

I will concede that humans have long exihibited a need for seclusion -- that from time to time, we remove ourselves from our fellows for whatever purpose. And that after putting out the effort to seclude ourselves, I see it reasonable to react negatively when someone intrudes on our seclusion.

Except for those times when we feel a need "to get away from it all", we need the company of our fellows. And to stand in the midst of other members of our species and then say, "You can't look at this! It's private!" is unreasonable.




I don't see how the monitoring of correspondence could be even remotely called a quick fix, considering it takes concerted effort over long periods of time to implement.

I argue that by monitoring email, a company can prevent the need for quick fixes. When you send an email with your company's domain name in the reply-to address, anything contained therein can be construed to be an action taken by the company. And if the company is going to have to deal with the fallout of the harrassment lawsuit brought because of offense caused by the dirty joke I thought the plaintiff would find funny when I emailed it to her, then the company can look at whatever it damned well pleases to protect itself and more importantly the value placed in it by its owners. ______________________________________________________________________
My God! It's full of stars!
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