Context and Online Privacy
An activity often carried out online nowadays is email. It was one of the greatest parts of the internet when it first became widely available to the public. This is because what often took up to a week in the past could be done in less than a minute depending upon one’s modem speed. The old-fashioned way of sending mail was to write something out either by hand or typewriter, fold it up and place it in an envelope which was then sealed, stamped and placed in a mailbox where the United States post office (or the equivalent in other countries) would retrieve it and take it to the post office. Then the letter’s postage would be “canceled” and the letter sent to its destination. If it got accidently sent to the wrong address, the sender had to resend it or the receiver had to wait for the person that got the letter to put it back in their mailbox so it could be delivered to the correct address eventually. It was a long and arduous process, but email solved all those problems and created some new ones.
Privacy in snail mail was never assured, but it always has been and continues to be a federal offense to open someone else’s mail. Most people are aware of this law because the postal service is a constant almost as reliable as the sun rising in the morning. The website, The Law Dictionary cites federal statute 18 USC Section 1702 that makes it illegal to open mail addressed to another person. If a person receives a huge pile of mail and is just going through opening them all and is not really paying attention to what he or she opens, that is allowed as long as the person puts the mail back in the envelope and returns it to the post office. If a person were to just throw the letter away, that would be committing a crime, so it is better to own up to the mistake and return the letter to the post office (Law Dictionary). The post office can get it to the rightful recipient.
Some people though open other people’s mail thinking they can gain something by doing so such as money perhaps. Sometimes relatives will send money in cards and mail thieves know this. The mail thief may also be trying to gain personal information such as credit card numbers or banking information. That is why credit card companies and other businesses that may send letters to their clients no longer put any type of identifying information on paper correspondence. People still steal credit card bills and other mail, but it is not as lucrative an activity anymore unless they find the cards from relatives with cash in them. When a person intentionally opens mail addressed to another person, they are committing mail fraud which is a federal crime. “Should the stolen mail be used to conduct another crime, like identity theft, then the thief might be facing additional charges” (Law Dictionary). One thing email helped to diminish is mail theft.
However, email is not private and can easily be “stolen.” Usually nothing of monetary value is attached to an email, unless the sender is really naïve or ignorant.
Helen Nissenbaum of Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences says, “Those who imagined online actions to be shrouded in secrecy have been disabused of that notion. As difficult as it has been to circumscribe a right to privacy in general, it is even more complex online because of shifting recipients, types of information, and constraints under which information flows” (Nissenbaum 32). Even deleting emails does not mean that they can no longer be accessed. This is because emails are stored in multiple locations including on the sender's computer, the Internet Service Provider's (ISP) server, and on the receiver's computer. Deleting an email does not that there are not other copies still out there. Still, there are laws that govern emails, and Nissenbaum thinks they should be made stronger so that the internet can continue to be a place of social good.
Laws that govern email privacy should be stronger. After all they include the Fourth Amendment to the Constitutions, the Electronics Communications Privacy Act and the Patriot Act. The Fourth Amendment says that everybody has “a reasonable expectation of privacy, “ but because email goes through so many different computers to get to the recipient’s, that expectation is much lower for emails. Other laws that protect emails are the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) and the Patriot Act. The website, Find Law, explains, “The ECPA originally set up protections (such as a warrant requirement) to protect email, those protections have been weakened in many instances by the Patriot Act. Even where the protections remain under the ECPA, emails lose their status as a protected communication in 180 days, which means a warrant is no longer necessary and your emails can be accessed by a simple subpoena” (Find Law). That is assuming that a law enforcement administration would want to see emails.
Emails that are sent at work have little privacy expectations. If an employee is sending personal emails while at work, his or her employer can see this and can read the emails. If an employer opens or reads an employee’s email, they are not considered to be committing mail theft. In fact, most employers have employees sign something when they are hired that says that their emails will be monitored and that they should not have any expectation of privacy. This is because employers have many reasons to be concerned about what employees are attaching and sending in their emails. Employees may just be robbing the employer of time he or she is paying them for working, but they could be also stealing company secrets and giving them to competitors. Employers also have to be concerned about liability issues with workplace harassment lawsuits being prevalent. Employees may be harassing someone through emails (Find Law). To prevent that, employers may use software that scans emails for offensive words or phrases. People employed by the government have even less expectation of privacy. “Under various public records acts and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the public can gain access to almost anything a government employee writes down. Also, due to the nature of their job, courts are typically unwilling to find that government employees had a reasonable right to privacy in the first place” (Find Law). So, email may be a more efficient method of communication, it is certainly not any more private than snail mail and it has a lot less protection surrounding it.
Nissenbaum thinks that laws and practices related to privacy in the cyber world should be made stronger so that people have more privacy when it comes to emails and other forms of communication through the internet. She says, “Benjamin Franklin knew as much when he insisted on privacy protection for the U.S. mail, not only to protect individuals but also to promote a meaningful social role for the service. We should expect no less for email” (Nissenbaum 43). Nissenbaum says that there should be multiple laws and practices that address all the issues related to the many different activities that people perform online including email, banking, shopping, etc. The internet has a positive social role and it should be protected so that it can serve that function.
Works Cited
Find Law. "Email Privacy Concerns." 2019. Find Law. Web. 18 November 2019. < https://consumer.findlaw.com/o... >.
Law Dictionary. "What Is The Federal Law For Opening Mail Not Addressed To You?" n.d. The Law Dictionary. Web. 18 November 2019. < https://thelawdictionary.org/a... >.
Nissenbaum, Helen. "A Contextual Approach to Privacy Online." Daedalus:Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 140.4 (2011): 32-48. Web. 18 November 2019. < https://www.amacad.org/sites/d... >.
