is Your Email Really Private?

Email Privacy

If you want privacy, don't count on email. Here's why.

Email may feel like a private, one-to-one conversation safe from prying eyes, but email is about as confidential as whispering at the White House. Your messages can be intercepted and read anywhere in transit, or reconstructed and read off of backup devices, for a potentially infinite period of time.

If you're sending email at work, your boss can legally monitor it, and if your company becomes involved in a lawsuit, your adversary has the legal right to review it. If you send email from home, anonymous hackers can intercept it, and if you are suspected of a crime, law enforcement officials with a warrant can seize your electronic correspondence. Even your Internet service provider may legally be able to scrutinize your email.

What all this amounts to is simple: Unless you take affirmative steps to encrypt your messages -- a process that uses sophisticated software to garble your words and then allow the recipient to unscramble and read them -- don't count on email as a confidential method of transmitting information.

Email at Work

On your first day of a new job, you may be asked to sign and acknowledge some form of employer email policy. This policy will probably inform you that email is to be used only for everyday business purposes, that the computer systems at work are the property of your employer, that email may be monitored, and that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in your use of email.

What does invasion of privacy mean?

A written statement like this, signed by an employee, creates a contract upon which an employer can rely if they want to snoop. Equally important, if a dispute arises over monitoring of email, the employer can point to the signed statement to show that it was unreasonable for the employee to think that email was private.

But do not despair!

There is one company who provides an email service that is totally private and that you are in control of. You can send emails that can not be copied or pasted and that will self destruct and disappear after the receiver reads it. You set it to self-destruct in a few minutes or to self-destruct after a specified number of access.

Check them out right here. Email is free forever, private, create video-email, customize your own portal, access all IM from one place, access all of your other email accounts, and your email can be recalled after you change your mind or self-destruct and never seen again! Shhh... You can also make a little cash while you are at it!

God Bless
Faith Renee Sloan
Entrepreneur-At-Large

Tags: bigstring, commission.bonus, darin mymar, email privacy, email service provider, faith r sloan, faith renee sloan, faith sloan, free email, make cash money

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Comment by Faith Sloan on June 19, 2009 at 10:41pm

You definitely have a point Jeanine. My spam bucket has a party every single day!

And no, the business model and revenue generator has nothing to do with email. But I truly do enjoy PeopleString's destructible and recallable email features at PeopleString!

God Bless
Faith

Comment by Jeanine Mercer on June 10, 2009 at 1:41pm: Hi Faith, I wish someone would hack into my emails and read them, "join this" and "join that" after a couple of pages of those I don't think they'll be interested any more! I give my email address out to everyone because I want them to reach out! jamsline@gmail.com

Comment by Ruth B. White on June 1, 2009 at 11:57pm: The comments from everyone is true, but sad that so much precaution has to be taken on privacy, because not only can someone hack into your email, if a person wanted to findout where you live, you IP address can also give that information out to a hacker. I've received emails from people who now have my home address from either ordering online or my IP address. That's scarey. How do we protect ourselves from that? I guess that's the downside of being in Cyber Space. www.breakingnewsjournal.net

Ruth White

Comment by Veejay on June 1, 2009 at 2:28am: I never write anything on an email of a private of personal nature, and anyone writing emails at work on their employer's computer system, in their employer's time should expect that the boss is at liberty to read it.

Comment by pearl lee on May 30, 2009 at 12:04am: never thought of that. You make a very good point, but I don't see why anyone would look at MY email. Unless they were stalkers or paranoids.

Comment by Robert Sloan on May 29, 2009 at 11:18pm: Actually, these all sound like good reasons not to work for companies with policies like that. Seriously. I wouldn't want to put up with anything that intrusive.

I suppose if you really want the job then getting some kind of encryption system like that could help, but that's just crazy. I'd more suggest do something else for a living where you don't have people in a hierarchy snooping on you to make sure you don't drop a note to your spouse to pick up the groceries or a congratulations to some coworker on a new baby or whatever.

This is about like those places that will time how long people take in the bathroom and dock their pay for it.

Comment by Catherine on May 29, 2009 at 5:07am: My motto is always sign-out after everything you do and switch off when not in use! Also, be careful what you say ... remember it is in writing!!!

Comment by charles kilner on May 28, 2009 at 8:27am: its just another form of socializing in the world we live in.

Comment by Angel1 on May 28, 2009 at 6:15am: I have to agree with many things said here. First, I don't presume that anythig is private, not even my phone conversations. Second, it is a good idea to never put anything in writing that might bite you later. Third, it is just plain unprofessional to send private e-mails from a business computer at your place of employment, and as far as your business e-mails go, well, see number two. Lastly, just as I would feel sorry for an identity thief that chose my identity to steal, because my credit is screwed for various reasons, I would also laugh at the hacker that hacked into my e-mails. I am small potatos. These hackers want to get information that they can benefit from in some way. They don't want me. and as far as virus protection goes, I would get it no mater how many times you sign in or out. That's my opinion. take it for what it is. Angel1

Comment by Ela Nickerson on May 27, 2009 at 3:46pm: Actually, it doesn't matter to me. I am probably surprising a bunch of you by saying that but I am just not the type of person who has anything to hide. I don't talk about people behind their backs. I don't gossip. I don't have sex on the internet. I don't have candestine affairs or government secrets! Nothing to hide. I live a clean life. Anything I would write in an email, I would say out loud at the mall.