Interception of E-Mail Raises Questions
The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that it is acceptable for a company that offers email service to surreptitiously track its subscribers’ messages.
The ruling was made in the case against the former vice president of Interloc, Inc., a literary clearinghouse that has since gone out of business. The vice president directed employees of the company to write computer code that would intercept and copy all email messages sent to its subscribers by Amazon.com. It is believed that the company was using the information found in those emails to learn about competitors and gain a commercial advantage. The government charged the vice president with illegal wire tapping. The charge, however, has been thrown out and the appeals court has ruled that the company had a right to track and copy the messages.
With the proliferation of email and other internet communications in use today, this ruling will have huge implications. It gives any company that provides email service the right to track, copy, and even read your private email messages. Since a majority of email users get their email from someone who provides the email service, whether it be hotmail, google, or their ISP, this means that none of us are safe from having our PRIVATE or even our business email communications copied and read. The company doesn’t even need to justify their reason for doing it. They can do so just because they feel like it if they want to. This is outrageous!
Once again, the courts have sided with the big-money company and stripped the little guy of what little protection he has. Once again, our right to privacy has been thrown out in the name of the almighty dollar. What next, if we rent a home or apartment, are the courts going to allow us to be videotaped without our knowledge since it is the LANDLORD’S property?
Maybe it’s just my opinion, but when I pay for a service, I EXPECT the right to a certain degree of privacy. A company should NOT have the right to swipe, copy, and read my email for it’s own commercial gain. If so, every small business or self-employed person who uses an email service is in jeopardy. If your service provider wants to, they can read your emails and steal your business ideas or secrets and there’s nothing you can do about it.
It’s time that we stand up and tell these judges that we’re not going to stand by and let them hand our rights over to big money companies anymore. If they won’t protect our children from pornography and our email from spies, then we need to remove them from the bench and replace them with judges who will.
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