On 01/18/2015 03:54 AM, Per Jessen wrote:
Note - reading != archiving. Also note, a machine reading the email != the employer reading the email.
Many still have trouble with this since, for example, courts & judges and politicians, don't understand that this is all just electrons and that moving them around and processing them often has no analogue in the physical world so physical world case law and practices do not hold. When I can five you something and not give it up myself, our ideas of property and individuality, and hence theft, and hence a whole pile of other stuff, has to change. The traditional legal system held that "what did they take?" and "what is missing?" were essentially the same. So if an employer's email system makes copies of all email going though the system it owns, regardless of whether that email is personal or corporate ... Then what? Perhaps there is some legal requirement for the corporate side and there's no way to differentiate. So unless a dispute comes up there is no need for the email to be viewed by humans. In fact even if a dispute comes up it may only be scanned by a search engine and the personal email never brought forward. So there is a kind of "Schrodinger's Cat" situation. If the email is stored but never read (thing GMail) then what's the privacy violation? Contrariwise: if I get a legal demand in the post as physical mail, say, for example, property taxes, and I never open the envelope and read it and so never respond, then in due course the local government will institute procedures that might ultimate have them foreclosing. "Not reading the (e)mail ..." might turn out to be a side issue compared to possessing a copy. In which case we have to deal with the issue of high density storage permitting you to have a copy of something such a a trade secret in a hidden file you didn't even know existed on a USB stick. Did you steal it? Was it planted there to involve you, or was it like the Sony rootkit incident, put there "at manufacturing"? Why does this all matter? If you are setting up an email system either as a corporate resource or a public service or even "for friends" then you are going to be faced with some legal issues eventually. Perhaps you are subject now to regulatory requirements. Perhaps your jurisdiction imposes privacy laws. You better find out and you better stay up to date as laws and regulations change. You may all well be friends right now, but friends have failings out... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org