Privacy@YourUniversity.edu

Email has grown to be a part of everybody’s lives. We use it to contact friends and family, submit resumes to potential employers, and unfortunately many people also use it to submit the same stupid jokes over and over(I know who you are! stop sending them to me!). With it we’ve also developed some basic “unspoken” rules that we tend to think everybody will abide by. For example, when you send an email, you expect the recipient to keep it private and not forward or show it to anybody.

This gives us a general sense of privacy. But, is your email really private? 

Many of us have taken classes in which we were instructed to get a campus email address.  This was so that the professor can notify us about course updates if the need arises.  However, the result of this is a large number of students using campus email for more than just communication between other students for their registered courses.  Thus, simply by using campus email, students have inadvertently left their information vulnerable.

To explain why, one simply needs to look at the Federal Records Act.

The Federal Records Act
The Federal Records Act was established to control the creation, management, and disposal of government records. Under the Federal Records Act, a document qualifies as a “record” if it meets the two conditions below:

1. “Made or received by an agency of the United States Government under Federal law or in connection with the transaction of public business”; and

2. “Preserved or appropriate for preservation by that agency…as evidence of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities of the Government or because of the informational value of the data in them.”

Under those conditions, the privacy of your campus email can be virtually erased.   It’s not a stretch to see how Professor/student email can be considered part of government activities/business. The Department of Education (DoE) is part of the U.S. government and all publicly funded universities fall under the umbrella of the DoE. So, it is very possible that the email activity of all of those working for and enrolled with the universities can be exposed to the Federal Records Act.

So how would this affect anything?

If you can just delete your email at your own volition, why would your email activity matter?  The reason is because a federal court of appeals ruled that government email systems contain “records”, in a case between the Executive Office of the President and the National Security Council. Therefore, any email between the two was/is subject to public disclosure. Additionally, the courts ruled that since email was a “record”, the agencies must retain and manage those documents. The emails couldn’t simply be erased on a whim. This ruling has dissuaded some away from even using email because anything and everything perceived as a “record” must be channeled in such a way so that it can be recorded as a public record.

Thus, even if you do delete the email from your account, it’s possible that a record of it still exists somewhere.

However, I’m not accusing my own alma mater, Southern Polytechnic State University, of doing anything wrong.  They have clearly made note in their Acceptable Use Policy, under section 3.1, that the use of their system is at your own risk. 

The Acceptable Use Policy is available online at: http://www.spsu.edu/infotech/policies/summary.html#3.1 and has been printed below for your convenience.  

Section 3.1 of the Acceptable Use Policy
”To the greatest extent possible in a public setting, SPSU desires to preserve individuals’ privacy. Electronic and other technological methods must not be used to infringe upon privacy. However, users must recognize that Southern Polytechnic State University computer systems and networks are public and subject to the Georgia Open Records Act. E-mail, messaging, and file storage/transfer services provided through state-owned facilities cannot be considered private. Users, thus, utilize such systems at their own risk.”

References
CyberLaw by Jonathan Rosenoer
Southern Polytechnic State University Acceptable Use Policy