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by rufibarbatus
5281 days ago
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I've been in the financial consulting business for a while and I'm still sometimes stunned by the kinds of things clients will send me as unencrypted email. What's the legal status of email? Is it treated as if it were "just like snail mail"? My point being: wouldn't it actually be better in terms of fostering awareness and better processes if cleartext email bore no presumed privacy whatsoever? Then, say, a couple standards might get updated, and companies might need to update their internal processes in order to comply. EDIT: Rearranged some paragraphs. Taking the opportunity to acknowledge the alternative to my "simply stop legally blessing people's treating email as if it were snail mail": to regulate the internet further and try to impose "Intel takedowns" and/or stricter protocols than the ones that outline email today. |
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If only. That would be an improvement. As matters stand, they're much more poorly protected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_privacy
> After 180 days in the U.S., email messages lose their status as a protected communication under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and become just another database record.[6] This means that a subpoena instead of a warrant is all that's needed for a government agency to force email providers such as Google's Gmail to produce a copy.[6] Other countries may even lack this basic protection, and Google's databases are distributed all over the world. Since the Patriot Act was passed, it's unclear whether this ECPA protection is worth much anymore in the U.S., or whether it even applies to email that originates from non-citizens in other countries.