How is that different from regular mail? Any postman can open the mail, copy/read the content and then close envelope. It is maybe 5 minutes of work.
Re:We're Fighting the Feds Over Your Email
by rayiner on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @06:51PM
(#8111420)
Its different because not only do mailmen not open mail as a matter of course, for advertising or operational purposes, its a felony to do so.
Re:We're Fighting the Feds Over Your Email
by tptacek on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @10:40PM
(#8112191)
But, under the ECPA, it is not a felony for system operators to do the same thing (for operational and diagnostic reasons) on networks carrying voice traffic. And yet nobody is suggesting that voice traffic isn't subject to wiretap laws.
Do you have a reasonable expectation of privacy for your bedroom or can the government freely search that too? Does your answer change after you hire a housekeeper (or housekeeping company) to dust your furniture and put away your socks?
You can't exclude the testimony of your housekeeper that your sock drawer was full of cocaine on the basis that you had an expectation of privacy, so yes, it changes a lot.
With that in mind, I just don't see how you can say you have an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy over e-mails in the cloud, when a system operator can pull up all your personal information going back years at the touch of a button. When the e-mail service not only has incidental access to the data, but actively looks into that "private" data and uses that "private" data for commercial purposes. It's a distorted, results-oriented definition of "privacy."
That said, you're likely going to get precisely that results-oriented interpretation, because apparently the Supreme Court, like most users, doesn't fully understand the scope of how cloud providers access and use and commercialize your data.