E-mail communication and the data and information privacy issues surrounding its usage.
Explore corporate e-mail policies, practices, procedures concerning e-mail and how these policies, practices and procedures affect data and information privacy? Additionally, integrate research into your paper involving any legal and regulatory issues which affect information privacy and e-mail communication.
- How do these issues affect an employer’s rights concerning employee’s e-mail usage?
- As part of your research I’d like you to find a corporate e-mail policy online and discuss the pros and cons of that policy as it applies to data security and online information privacy.
Additionally, review the following issue and integrate it into your research paper: This story (Harvard secretly searched Deans’ e-mail: Chasing leak in cheating scandal may have invaded privacy) recently broke and it is a perfect subject to integrate into this paper about e-mail privacy since it dovetails very nicely with the subject we are studying this semester: information privacy. Review the story online originally reported on by the Boston Globe, conduct research on this issue and be prepared to discuss the relevant issues. Harvard administrators are up in arms that their e-mail accounts were searched without their consent.
- What are the issues?
- Do employers have to get employee’s “consent” to search their e-mail accounts?
- What, if anything, did Harvard have to do before they searched the Dean’s e-mail accounts?
- Did they have to notify the employee’s? Why or why not?
- What would have to be in place for there NOT to have been any notification needed?
- If there is employment law in the state which supports the employer, can Harvard have violated employee’s privacy despite what the employees may personally feel?
- Are there legitimate information privacy concerns involved when using your employer’s e-mail system? If so, what are they?
- Why do you feel you do, or do not, have legitimate privacy expectations when using your employer’s e-mail system and was Harvard justified in their search of Dean’s e-mail accounts?
- What are the legal justifications and case precedence for this type of action?
These questions, and the information above, frame the issues you need to discuss in your paper about e-mail privacy but there may be other relevant issues in your paper that are directly relevant to the topic of e-mail privacy that you want to include.
