How to Determine if Your Email is Protected by Online Privacy Rights

What does privacy mean in the electronic age? To avoid an invasion of your privacy, it's important to determine exactly what your online privacy rights are. Sometimes your emails are protected with all the force and power of law, but others are susceptible to legal snooping. Before you send sensitive or personal information via email, be sure to know whether or not it is protected.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Know your exact rights, as provided by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (see Resources below). Privacy rights vary from state to state, but the ECPA is national law, providing for email privacy against government surveillance without a court order, from the Internet Service Providers and from snooping third parties.

2. Search your work records. When hired, an employee will often sign a contract authorizing the employer to read the employee's work-related emails.

3. Know where the privacy of your emails ends. While your email privacy may be legally protected, this of course does not necessarily mean that it is totally secure, as criminals exist online just like anywhere else. The police are, in some cases, allowed to legally read your personal emails, but only when granted a warrant to do so by a judge.

Tips & Warnings

• While your email privacy may be legally protected, this of course does not necessarily mean that it is totally secure, as criminals exist online just like anywhere else.
• Even if your workplace does not have an explicit policy regarding email privacy, your employer may still be monitoring your emails. Employer email privacy is still a contentious issue in law today, but more often than not the courts have upheld employer rights.

Resources

• Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986
• Electronic Privacy Information Center for more information
• Morgan, Lewis, and Bockius for an in-depth analysis of employer email rights

[bluecraze378]

on 10/26/2009 Obviously the best way to protect your privacy is to not post private information in public places: forums, chatrooms, public email services etc....

I also use a private email service: http://www.privacyharbor.com

There are others out there like Hushmail and mymail etc... but privacyharbor seems to be the only one that has not given up users' private data to the government or tried to mine people's info to post ads on their account. They keep all your info private and safe which is cool.

Lots of ways to protect privacy though so best of luck to all.