Legal Implications was(Re: Announce: MailScanner-Console-0.1)

[David]

On Montag, Juni 16, 2003, at 08:27  Uhr, Jody Cleveland wrote:

>> I've written a web based front-end to MailScanner using a
>> modified &SQLLogging routine, PHP, MySQL and JpGraph.
>
> I was looking at this, and I think it looks fantastic. I have one
> question though regarding privacy. I'm going to pitch this to my boss,
> and my network admin brought up a good point. "This program will tell
> us, at a glance, who is talking to who and about what."
>
> Does anyone else see any privacy concerns with this?
>
I can only speak for some of us, But let me try to explain the 
situation for most European union members.
In Austria electronic communication is protected by the 
telecommunications act an the postal secrecy law. Which basically means 
the following.

If you are 100% sure that your employees pass only work related Mail 
messages via you corporate network you may review the mail traffic, you 
may even view the body of each message because that is believed to be 
within right of use of the company. This means that you do not even 
necessarily need consent from your employees. Here comes the bog but, 
as soon as only a SINGLE message which is private passes over your 
corporate network NO message may be reviewed without EXPLICIT consent 
of the whole body of employees.

However there is no real application for this yet because it has never 
been discussed in a court of law. The basic rule is, that you need to 
bind your employees explicitly to a contract which states "You may not 
send or receive _any_ private messages here at work". Since most 
companies do not have such a  policy in place and it does not seem very 
feasible you may neither archive mail messages, nor review the contents 
of mail messages on your corporate network without prior consent of the 
employees.

I hope that helps

-d

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