Email Disclaimers

[Matthew Carpenter]

On Friday 27 May 2005 02:54 am, Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
> Seriously, I think the only purpose is that if you are found incorrectly
> in possession of an e-mail that contains this text, you cannot say you
> did not know. However, I doubt that this would ever hold up in court
> when it is blindly applied to all e-mails. How, then, do you tell if
> this is one you should have or one you should not have? Also, many of
> these e-mails contain attachments and reply-text that do not belong to
> the company putting the little blurb at the bottom. So it is not even
> clear which parts can really be applied to the disclaimer.

Actually, if it is tagged to *every* email, it is considered a policy, and 
that alone is worth traction in a court of law.  As opposed to someone 
willy-nilly tagging some of their email.  The courts are not like computers.  
They (while I often put little faith in them) actually attempt to dig into 
details, and care about things such as intent.  A qualified lawyer (note that 
I did not use the word "good") can make good use of all of these things.

On Friday 27 May 2005 11:49 am, David Bandel wrote:
<snip>
> Note:  IANAL!

At first I thought you were writing "I AM NOT A LIAR"...  Then I realized the 
message was the same :)

> According to my understanding of the law, for one party (exception:
> the government of which you are a citizen or the country you are
<snip>
> not enjoined from doing with the contents of the e-mail as you please.
>  That said, unless you're just mean, you probably wouldn't want to
> post embarrasing or otherwise sensitive information on a web page, but
> the author really could do nothing about it.
>
> An e-mail should be thought of like a postcard.  anyone can read it.
> You have no expectation of privacy whatsoever.   If you want a
> reasonable expectation of privacy, then you should encrypt the message
> using GPG, etc.

I agree, but the courts don't seem to.  In fact, monitoring emails in transit 
is still breaking the wiretap laws.
>
> People that waste bandwidth with idiotic and useless disclaimers
> should be considered in the same category as spammers.
>
> I welcome any thoughts/facts that would repute the above.

The one good thing for bottom- or top-tagging is notification.  Scare-tactics 
also come to mind (it works on those who actually think they're in violation 
because Grandma forwarded an email with that tag on it).

This is important in security, where wiretap laws can put a damper on 
effective monitoring, unless appropriate notification is in order.  This is 
why many companies make employees sign a copy of the security policy to make 
certain it has been read and understood.  Perhaps this tagging could prove 
"due dilligence" in two-party notify states.  (two-party states require that 
both parties of a communication must be notified that their communication is 
being monitored)

This is also why we are starting to implement IM-message headers which notify 
both parties of IM traffic that their conversation is being logged.  That is 
the only real value of tagging a notice on email and other communication.

The obvious other possibility is to attempt to look more important than you 
are.
-- 
Matthew Carpenter 
matt at eisgr.com                          http://www.eisgr.com/

Enterprise Information Systems
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