This is not strictly true with US businesses and academia. My last place of employment was a university, and per our legal, all data going through the Universit

This is not strictly true with US businesses and academia. My last place of employment was a university, and per our legal, all data going through the University email or computers is University property; while there is a pledge from IT that all email is private and will not be accessed except for specific circumstances, these circumstances could be pretty much anything and had no relationship to any existing case law outside of what legal felt was necessary to use as reason for why we could access it. But the pledge was just a formality - should there be any interest to check the mail, there was nothing technically stopping anyone with the required access except for someone else with equal access having a problem with it. Likewise, various management offices had no issue with submitting email fetch requests for the simplest of things, with date ranges exceeding two or three years sometimes for what turned out to be incredibly minor reasons. There really is no expectation of privacy with academia in the US when it comes to University owned property or services. (The only reason I found out about any of this from legal was because I asked for clarification on our "duty to report", and one of the lawyers was almost excited as he told me about how we own everything legally.)