[Folks might want to check, for example, Google's Gmail policy at gmail.com, which says "no human will read the content of your email in order to target such advertisements or other information without your consent... Google employees do not access the content of any mailboxes unless you specifically request them to do so (for example, if you are having technical difficulties accessing your account) or if required by law, to maintain our system, or to protect Google or the public." Perhaps other e-mail providers and ISPs aren't as pro-privacy as Google? --Declan] -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Do ISPs' Policies Allow Them to Monitor E-mail? Date: Thu, 08 Jul 2004 10:10:08 -0400 From: Doug Isenberg <disenberg@private> To: declan@private Declan: First, congratulations on the new Politech website; it's very nice! (And, I know it required a lot of work.) Next, I read your post and column on the U.S. v. Councilman decision from the First Circuit, and your reference to state law is interesting. You may have read a New York Times article about the case, in which the reporter wrote: "Because most major Internet providers have explicit policies against reading their customers' e-mail messages, the ruling would seem to have little effect on most people." I wanted to see whether this was really true, so I went looking for these "explicit policies" at the big three ISPs in the United States -- AOL, MSN and EarthLink -- and I have my doubts. Read my findings in the GigaLaw.com blog entry, "Do ISPs' Policies Allow Them to Monitor E-mail?" at http://www.gigalaw.com/2004/07/do-isps-policies-allow-them-to-monitor.html Doug Isenberg Attorney at Law Editor & Publisher, GigaLaw.com (http://www.GigaLaw.com) // Get FREE daily technology law news @ http://www.GigaLaw.com/news // _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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