Most of us don't, I know I didn't. What's more, have you ever thought about the rights that your email provider gives to themselves or to others to read your emails or simply not deliver them to you, based on their own reasons? Until recently, I hadn't given it much thought but recently I came across an article about Apple skimming through their user's emails and deleting anything that uses the phrase "barely legal teen." (http://goo.gl/Hre2V) I'm not going to get into the social or any other kind of moralities involving porn but I do have a problem with big companies like this going through my emails and deleting things without warning.
What got me thinking about this topic more is that my parents are in Hawaii for their 25th wedding anniversary (I guess for those that don't know me very well, I've just dated myself) and I got a call from my mom complaining that she hadn't received any emails for days. Anyone that's had an email account for more than a few days knows this is reason to fret. She called Verizon and they went through various procedures to try to recover her emails including changing her password but ultimately they were unable to determine the problem. She called me again and I logged into her account and started skimming through her account settings and found that someone had hacked into her account somehow and had been forwarding all of her emails to their account.
I was a little angry by now because Verizon had failed to figure this out on their own but mostly because someone had been essentially looking through my mom's mail and there was really nothing we could do about it. We have the person's email address and it seems to be a personal address which my dad (given free reign with the email address and his iPad) discovered to be linked to the person's Facebook account. It seems to be a pretty dopey criminal to have used their personal email address for their malicious acts but then what was it we could do? I'm no expert on US internet law but as far as I know, there isn't a law against reading other people's emails.
Shouldn't it be, though? In this day in age, more people are turning to the internet for their communications. That means that people are getting a lot of personal mail to their email inbox like people used to get in their mailbox. Let me remind you that opening another person's physical mail is a felony and now I'm to just sit idly by when my mother's mail was intercepted and very likely will never be seen again and more than that the person who did it will go unpunished?! That is just ludicrous. I'm hoping that one of you reading this will correct me and tell me there is something we can do about it but I'm afraid that won't be the case. With the way that laws are set up, the owner of an email address's privacy is (ironically) protected in such a way that it might be impossible to actually be certain who owns the email account and then give them due process.
This brings me to my core topic. Should anyone without explicit permission be allowed to read your emails? I give Google Now permission to read my emails to give me notifications in regards to airplane boarding passes or package tracking information but other than that scanning of my email for those key words, should Google have any right to read my emails? I realize that when you sign up to have iCloud backup your information the end-user agreement says that they have the right to delete anything that they deem to be inappropriate from their servers and to a degree, I understand and agree with their right to do that. It's their servers, so they can do with the email what they want...but at the same time, where does that stop? Everyone gets all bent out of shape when they hear about the government looking into our emails or listening to our phone calls, so what is the difference? I've come to the conclusion and I've reconciled with the fact that even though I'm one in a million, meaning essentially I'm just a piece of data, Google knows me better than most people do! Even with that being the case, I don't have a high desire to have people reading my mail other than me. I don't typically send out information that I'm worried about being intercepted via email, usually I reserve that for SMS but that's really the problem I'm speaking to. I shouldn't have a reservation for sending my mail because I'm worried about the wrong people seeing it. If there were stricter laws in place to hold people responsible it would reduce the domestic issue, at least!
As I put in the title, this is strictly an opinion piece, but what do you guys think? Is this something that we should be concerned with or do you think that this is just the nature of the modern internet and we are going to have to live with it? Tell me what you think in the comment section below or on the original post on Facebook or Google+.
The line between private and public in the online realm is already very blurred. People want privacy when exchanging personal information, but that information is on a companies servers. The problem is, all the working and efficient email providers are owned by a company, and more specifically only a few companies. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, and a few lesser known ones. If we follow this logic, all information that we exchange could possibly be owned by these companies (since it's on their servers) and not owned by the individuals. Since our lives are becoming increasingly digitized, it is possible that we will not own our personal information in the future.
ReplyDeleteOf course that only covers the company side of it, because as you said it is possible for individual hackers to get information as well. That is the trade-off for going into any new technology. Before written language was created, the only way you got information was to eaves drop on two people talking, which was difficult. It's much easier for someone to leave a written note somewhere unattended and have someone else read it. In the technology age, it's as easy as someone having the time to learn the computers language in order to exploit it.
Our ability to have privacy while still being a productive member of society is becoming increasingly difficult, because new technologies can be exploited by both companies and individuals. The problem is, we never sat down as a nation and talked about how this technology could possibly impact our society, and we didn't make precautions in the legal realm to protect individuals from it. There was a book written in the 80's that foresaw this happening exactly how it happened: we just let it. The book is called "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman; pick it up when you get the chance. Also pick up a book called "Alone Together" by Sherry Turkle if you're interested in a modern look at how technology has impacted our individual lives.
There really is no easy solution to all this either, since we're already so far into this crap. We can't ask people to stop using email or anything online related, because it's integrated into them leading a beneficial life. We can only look into trying to fix this poking and prodding companies do with emails. We need to make clear boundaries as to what's public and private. Of course, that's difficult since these companies have their hands in the pockets of the government on these matters. As far as the individual people poking their heads in, I have no clear solution to that. It would only take someone very skilled at computer science to come up with a way to have better internet security. Even then, does the security lay in the hands of the individual, or how the program is written?
Ok I'm done, I need to wash my undies and eat cheez-it's.
Thanks for your input, Chase! I agree that a lot has to do with the companies that already have their hands deep into this and it would be very hard to reverse. Plus, there are a lot of benefits to having some of your emails scanned, like I mentioned above with Google Now alerting me if one of my emails mentions a tracking number for a package or a boarding pass. On the other hand, I feel like my email should be treated as though it were actual mail and not have anyone poking their noses into it. I think my bigger concern than companies being nosy, is individuals, though. There are lots of things that Google or Apple can do with my data, like sell it to other marketing companies or use it to market back to me but that's not really concerning since it isn't of a malicious nature. I'm more concerned about individuals snooping through my email to steal my personal information with the ultimate hopes of stealing my money (of which there isn't much to begin with). To this I respond by pointing out that there are hundreds if not thousands of people working right now to increase security in the digital aspects of our lives. One of my friends is very interested in cyber security and intends to make it his career after graduating from college. I think that the companies that have made it their responsibility to look over our email by providing us with our email accounts need to be more vigilant about preventing fraud and protecting their users. I admit that might be a lot to ask from these people who are providing a free service, for the most part but I guess it's just something I expect if I am going to be emailing people. That all being said, my mom's old email password wasn't the best in the world but I don't think it is something someone would have just guessed on a whim. Glad to hear from you and hear your opinion, Chase! I hope School is going well!
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