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IANAL but I believe it is illegal to read mail in this way. You have an expectation of privacy with a letter. Same with your house, you have a reasonable expe
by vladus2000 10y ago
IANAL but I believe it is illegal to read mail in this way. You have an expectation of privacy with a letter. Same with your house, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy within it. That being said, I believe if this is cheap enough they will start doing it in secret and the courts probably will not stop it. Whether or not they will attempt to use anything gained from it directly in court is debatable but it could lead to parallel construction cases.
- rurban 10y agoThat's not true. According to US interpretation of law they may scan every IMAP mail which was not deleted. So in their analogy any book in a public or cooperate museum may be scanned, there is no privacy protection. Only in democratic countries you can expect some privacy.
- bhickey 10y agoMail and e-mail are legally distinct.
- keyjsgnsgdgn 10y agoThat is false. https://consumerist.com/2013/07/03/forget-the-nsas-hi-tech-snooping-the-usps-has-been-scanning-our-mail-for-years/ https://consumerist.com/2013/07/03/forget-the-nsas-hi-tech-s...
- novaleaf 10y agowow! a rebuttal of a rebuttal, of a rebuttal, of a rebuttal! =D
- bhickey 10y agoNote that I didn't say "You have absolute privacy in postal mail." The two have different legal protections, and those on snail mail are incontrovertibly stronger.
- wodenokoto 10y agoThis article is related to scanning the outside of snail mail and is not relevant for the discussion at hand.
- sp332 10y agoYou have to leave the mail sitting for a certain amount of time, at which point it falls under the "abandoned" part and can be picked up without a warrant. Unfortunately they didn't interpret email being read as being picked up, since it's still sitting in the server.
- awqrre 10y agobut since you don't have an expectation of privacy when a third party cloud service handles your data, according to the law, why would you have an expectation of privacy for letters handled by third parties... for example, the Government can legally read all your emails hosted by a third party if they are 6 months or older (http://www.businessinsider.com/when-can-the-government-read-your-email-2013-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/when-can-the-government-read-...)
- Dylan16807 10y agoThere are special rules about the postal service. They're not just a third party.
- Cyph0n 10y agoSo you believe that intelligence agencies have no way to read your mail if they wanted to? Come on.