E-mail Privacy

[Geert Rolf]

At a company (or a school/university etc) you use the computer to do your
work. The results of the work belong to the employer (or the school etc)
depending on your contract or the law.

Sending E-mail can be private, unless the employer forbids you to use
E-mail for anything else than "work". (Which should be stated in advance,
as others said already)

In case 'private' e-mail is permitted, the files should have the same
protection as the companies phone-system: no-one is allowed to tap the
public-phone (except with permission of some Court?), no employer is
allowed to tap the companies phone system.

When someone leaves a company, s/he should remove her/his personal files
and leave her/his work.

As a system-administrator you have to have some rules: only the owner
or the author of a file can ask you to retrieve it from the backuptapes.
(In this case: the memo came from the boss)

In case the boss asks you to retrieve a file from someone still working
there, i should send the boss to the person that owned or authored the
file. (As the person has left the company and should have removed the
personal files, it should not be a problem now. Although I do feel that
the Integrity of the System Manager is questioned here)

In day to day life, the system manager is asked to open files that belong
to someone who got ill and the rest of the project is willing to proceed.
It should not be hard to decide that the files contain "work" in that case.

Anyway: most computers contain -among others- 'personal' files, and the
Integrity of the System Manager should not violate <<privacy>>. (As should
the Boss!!)

/* Here in Holland law on Privacy is rather new, how about the U.S?? */
BTW: 'rumors' usually travel through companies by E-mail

Geert Rolf,
University of Nijmegen
geertr at sci.kun.nl