e-mail privacy concerns over recent ruling
According to Wired News, the First Court of Appeals in Massachusetts ruled that a bookseller who offered free e-mail accounts to his customers did not violate criminal wiretap laws when he copied and read the mail of his customers in order to monitor their transactions. You can read the court’s decision here.
Now, Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said of the decision in the Wired News article, “By interpreting the Wiretap Act’s privacy protections very narrowly, this court has effectively given Internet communications providers free rein to invade the privacy of their users for any reason and at any time.” And Mike over at TechDirt seems to agree with him.
Is this true? Is this a reasonable interpretation of the court’s decision? I don’t have enough legal knowledge to even weigh in on this one, but I’d be curious to hear what others think. Especially after all the hoo-hah about Google being able to read Gmail users’ e-mails… If the above interpretation is correct, then any ISP could be reading your e-mail whenever they want to.
July 1st, 2004 at 1:34 pm
I pretty much have always accepted someone unintended reading my e-mail as a risk of the format. It’s insecure, and I expect my ISPs may sometimes scan through my e-mail in cases of harassment or legal matters. The university my bachelor’s degree is from made no secret of the fact that they store your e-mail and can check it if there’s a problem or accusation.
While I don’t disagree that privacy could get more emphasis, I don’t think I want the wiretap act interpreted too liberally either, or the next time I pick up a baby monitor’s signal with another electronic device, I could be facing charges. (Stretching laws to cover new contingencies isn’t a good idea.) The best course, in my completely non-lawyerly opinion, would be to write a law specifically addressing e-mail privacy concerns but allowing ISPs to search/read e-mail under specified conditions.
Darn shady business practices, however. I wonder if that’s legally actionable?
July 1st, 2004 at 1:40 pm
Addendum: Just because people don’t like the effects doesn’t make the decision wrong. It just makes things inconvenient, and instead of questionably expanding the coverage of a law it allows for that coverage to be introduced an appropriate way–through another law.