[vladus2000]

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.

[awqrre]

but 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-...)

[Dylan16807]

There are special rules about the postal service. They're not just a third party.

[Cyph0n]

So you believe that intelligence agencies have no way to read your mail if they wanted to? Come on.

[rurban]

That'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]

Mail and e-mail are legally distinct.

[keyjsgnsgdgn]

That is false.

https://consumerist.com/2013/07/03/forget-the-nsas-hi-tech-s...

[wodenokoto]

This article is related to scanning the outside of snail mail and is not relevant for the discussion at hand.

[novaleaf]

wow! a rebuttal of a rebuttal, of a rebuttal, of a rebuttal! =D

[bhickey]

Note 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.

[sp332]

You 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.