Court Says College Can Snoop On Students' Email
from the no-privacy-violation dept
There have been plenty of cases where courts have said that it's okay for an employer to snoop on (employer-provided) employee email accounts. And now there's a case saying basically the same thing for colleges and universities. As long as they provided the email system, there's apparently no violation of anti-snooping or data privacy laws. I definitely understand the reasoning here, though one might argue that the relationship between a student and a university is quite different than an employee and employer. And I could see how students might have a much higher expectation of privacy. Still, do students really use university email addresses any more, or do they have their own primary email accounts that they had before heading off to school?
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Filed Under: college, email, privacy, snooping, universities
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Re:
Why can't Fedex open your mail they deliver? Why is electronic mail different?
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Re: Re:
HTTPS. SSL. TOR. PGP/GPG. S/MIME. AES. . . .
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Shipping with FedEx/etc is more akin to sending an encrypted email.
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still use mine
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Re: still use mine
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Re: still use mine
The Arizona state schools are all gmail based, and required for official communication from the school. Heck, even the local community college here also requires it.
GBH
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Re: Re: still use mine
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Ah, sorry... they already do the automatic thing...
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At many universities Google is providing the apps/email system. For example, UofMinnesota runs it's own google-powered nodes.
Can google and the Uni both snoop that? Inquiring minds want to know.
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The logical conclusion
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Re: The logical conclusion
Or learn Navajo... did they ever break that language yet?
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Re: Re: The logical conclusion
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Re: The logical conclusion
Encrypt your mail.
Sheesh. People fought the “crypto wars” so that you'd have rights. Use them.
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For e-mail accounts management one could use Evolution or Thunderbird. Those allow people to handle dozens(or hundreds) of email accounts easily, well once you registered all of them that is.
Encryption should be second nature for people in todays world, where judges instead of erring on the side of privacy err on the side of others that want to violate that privacy.
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Being a student is not the same
Students are not employees and pay to be there, email is part of the paid for service and should thusly have a client /provider privilege of privacy.
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Same relationship?
First, and obviously, I paid the Uni to go there... I wish it had been the other way.
Second, would the Uni be responsible for my actions? I know that Employers bear some responsibility for the actions of employees while in the course of business. But if I use my Uni-provided account to break the law (infringing, defamation, etc.), would the Uni be held responsible? And I mean actually held responsible, not just accused and included on a lawsuit only to be dismissed later.
While the fact that the Uni is providing that email service means they may have some standing of "well, it's our service, we're just letting you use it" to justify snooping, I don't think it's the same area as the Employer/Employee fight.
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Re: Same relationship?
-1 for reading-comprehension fail today. :|
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I do not, under an circumstances have that email account send anything even barely personal. It is for school and only for school.
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colleges and email
most colleges that I know of will not send emails out to a private address unless required to do so by law or some other special circumstance.
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alumni use college email too
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Students, however, do harass each other and send inappropriate messages to each other, so the university receives complaints about these and resolves them by "spying". What they do on private external accounts is their business. What they do on the university system can put at risk the reputation of the university.
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With that said... who the hell cares about what students say to each other? It's email. This is a few students talking to each other in a way that's not polite in society's view. And?
You know what would garner more respect from me? A university that looks at a harassing string of email calling a student a Jew (derisively) and tells that student "stop opening the emails" and moves on to more important things, like the quality of education and rising costs of tuition and/or the Great Book Racket.
And if there are a bunch of emails flying around 'hurting people's feelings'... did I miss the part where college students weren’t freakin adults? Do they need hand-holding and a widdle hug to tell them everything is going to be ok every time someone makes fun of them? Seriously? So instead of preparing young adults for the world that awaits, it’s now part of the university’s job to further shelter them so that nothing ever hurts them?
If universities start taking that job of life-preparation seriously again, maybe people outside the university-sphere (like me) will care about university reputation.
Sorry… rant over.
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The fact that the school provided the system was only relevant to the SCA claim. The privacy claims were dismissed for other reasons. Perhaps you should actually read the case and understand the law before blogging about it. I know, I know. That's not going to happen.
I definitely understand the reasoning here, though one might argue that the relationship between a student and a university is quite different than an employee and employer. And I could see how students might have a much higher expectation of privacy.
How is "expectation of privacy" relevant here?
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There are at least four classes of such.
1. There are public (US concept of public) schools where the student pays to attend. The e-mail system at these schools is owned by government just as the school is.
2. There are private (US concept of private) schools where the student pays to attend. The e-mail system at these schools is not owned by government or the students.
3. There are public schools where the student is paid to attend (West Point being one such). The e-mail system at these schools is owned by government just as the school is and the students are government employees.
4 There are private schools where the student is paid to attend. This is especially true of company owned and managed training schools. The e-mail system at these schools is not owned by government or the students.
It is ludicrous to think that the law in each of the above situations is the same or that the students have the same rights and privileges.
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My take on things
This seems less like a University being able to snoop in their student as much as an email provider being able in investigate threats against its own employees.
Normally, when an employee is threatened, the company in question would find all technical data involving the threat, then see about getting a court order from the email provider from which the email originated.
In this case, the company had full access to all relevant data and was able to skip over forcing another company, via court order, to hand over data.
There wasn't a whole lot of data provided and it really depends on the level of threat.
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Required
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Fools!...
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That sound...
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Nobody Uses University Provided Email
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encryption
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/
http://enigmail.mozdev.org/home/index.php.html
http://www.gnupg.org/
Not universally usable but between two people it works well.
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Re: encryption
Neither is internet email, anymore. Spam killed the early, hoped-for promise of universal email connectivity. Now the only “universal” is that some spam will get through the filters—and some desired email will be lost in the spam filters.
I understand the younger kids look at email as old-folks' tech, anyhow.
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They can't check it even if they wanted to. All they can check is the headers.
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On topic of Employee-Employer vs Student-University relationships, its something I've never really understood and just accepted. As a student I was paying quite large fees for education, and the university was monitoring my internet usage and claiming the rights to all of my intellectual property (like an employer). Surely we are the employers, or at least just customers, whom have rights to privacy and self enterprise?
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Um...
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