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This is another area where your intuition might say A but in reality the law is !A. Under federal law an email provider may not "knowingly divulge" the content
by declan 13y ago
This is another area where your intuition might say A but in reality the law is !A.
Under federal law an email provider may not "knowingly divulge" the contents of email "to any governmental entity" without a court order or emergency situation involving "serious physical injury." Violations are punishable by "imprisonment for not more than 1 year" and civil liability.
It's true that there's an exception to the law. That says providers may share the contents of customers' communications only "with the lawful consent" of the user. A federal appeals court in 2003 narrowed that, saying consent exists only when the "party knew about and consented to the interception." And the FTC has said that it's unlawful for a company not "to adequately disclose" it's sharing information.
Translation: if Comcast buried a we-will-disclose-all-your-email-to-the-FBI in the fine print of its terms of service, its executives risk felony charges (and mass defections). In the real world, Comcast doesn't do that -- and it is illegal to hand over your emails without a warrant.
- tptacek 13y agoEmployers can share email messages without any consent. IT operators do not face felony charges for establishing that term. Where is the line drawn? Where do companies cease to have the freedom to establish their own contracts with their users? Also, what's the felony statute to which you're referring?
- declan 13y agoSure, if we're talking about employers, the rules are different. But most of the discussion in this thread has been about non-employer email providers. The line is actually drawn pretty reasonably in that case, if you spend some time thinking about it. The felony statute I was referring to far above was the Wiretap Act. The "not more than 1 year" in prison is from the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. Also if you're talking about cable providers you need to look at the Communications Act of 1934 and the Cable TV Privacy Act of 1984. Enjoy. :)
- tptacek 13y agoYou're on a thread talking about employers searching mail, Declan.
- declan 13y agoActually this thread was not about routine employer-employee searches, but Harvard College and faculty email searches. Harvard is as far as I can tell unique in providing its faculty -- thanks to a very able computer science professor there -- with contractual privacy rights that go above and beyond the rights any other university or employer provides. (The resident deans whose email was searched were faculty, not staff employees. The 12 RDs of the Houses are faculty with a lecturer rank: two of them serve on the Faculty Council; Harvard views RDs as faculty when reporting faculty counts; Harvard tells US News and World Report they're full-time faculty, etc.) But then of course the thread veered into other directions including Google, Qwest, shell corporations, the NSA, the British Parliament, Comcast, etc. As usual!