Does anybody know if the data protection act has anything to say about personal mailboxes on something like Outlook ?

Reason I ask is an asshole at work who knows the admin password, is poking around personal mailboxes without asking or telling the people who 'own' the mailboxes.

Doesn't seem legal to me, but I wondered if it's covered by the data prot. act, cos it is illegal to tamper with snailmail and I'd have thought the same should apply for e-mail.

-- Anonymous, July 28, 2000

Answers

your company email and all data used by it is the property of the company. if you want to keep something from prying eyes use hotmail or somthing like that.

-- Anonymous, July 28, 2000

some people have been sacked for insulting colleagues in what they thought were private emails.

I think morally it is a bit iffy to pry like that, but it does happen. IT depts can check for words like job, CV etc to see what their people are up to.

I think my company is too inefficient to do that sort of stuff.

The only saving grace is what some KGB geezer once told me in an interview for a paper I did about their bugging of hotel rooms etc. He admitted that they recorded most rooms with foreigners in etc, but that they didn't have the man hours to listen to more than about 1% of what they recorded.

-- Anonymous, July 28, 2000

Interestingly, the Regulation and Investigatory Powers Bill has completed its passge through Parliament and once it's implemented, all sorts of agencies can trawl your e mail (subject to protections) and a firm or individual can be jailed for refusing to give acces to relevant encryption info. I don't thinks Pit Bill's is really a data protection question. If you use work resources, them you can't really complain about them being monitored. However, they do have to tell you that they are doing so and that they have a policy on the matter.

-- Anonymous, July 28, 2000

Pit Bill, is this an 'official' policy. Or is it just a guy who takes care of some of the computers? If the latter, he should probably be taken care of by your firm's internal policy.

How does he use the info, anyway? There might not be anything under the data protection laws but there are plenty of others.

-- Anonymous, July 28, 2000

Si

A Geordie at Imperial College?!?!?!? Whatever next! :-)

(recognised the domain from when my own dept were in its clutches)

-- Anonymous, July 28, 2000

Si,

Which department RU in?

-- Anonymous, July 28, 2000

Yep, a Geordie at Imperial College. There are a few of us around - with contacts in the NUFC ticket office - so we go off to several matches together.

I'm in the Physics department...

Dr Si

-- Anonymous, July 29, 2000

Si
It's a sort of vendetta thing as far as I can tell - doesn't have anything directly to do with me, and the guy doing the snooping is being seen to officially.

I'd have thought that e-mail should be considered in the same light as snail mail. If I had snail mail addressed to me at work I'd be well p****d off if I knew somebody was opening it before I got it.

E-mail is no different IMO.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2000

Do you remember the Dianna/Hewitt letters fiasco? Well, the courts decided that the paper on which the letters were written belonged to Hewitt (so taking the letters from him would be theft) but the words on the paper belonged to Dianna's estate (so he couldn't publish them).

It's kinda the same for you, the disk space belongs to your company but the words in there belong to you (or whoever wrote them). Your company can look at the data (because it is on something that belongs to them) but they are limited in what they can do with that info.

Want to be certain? Try encrypting any personal files you need to stay personal!

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2000

According to today's FT, the Data Protection Commissioner is issuing a Code of Practice detailing when and how enployers can track employees' e mail...

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2000

Si
I'd thought about encryption, but wouldn't that mean everybody I'd be likely to send e-mail would need to have the same encrypyion software set up ? Or are e-mail systems clever enough for the receiving end to detect encrypted mail and unscramble it automatically ?

Plus, I'd be likely to fall foul of the new law on encrypted mail.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2000

You can set up your email with some encryption properties. Or you could simply move any 'sensitive' emails into a file which you then encrypt yourself. Most of these encryption programs are hard to break and - I think - you can only get in trouble with the law if you refuse to decrypt them when asked by the authorities.

-- Anonymous, July 31, 2000