Tag: privacy

Because You Don’t Need to Read Email from the Grave

Google Doodle from Day of the Dead 2012

In a move that will probably make those squeemish about their privacy happy, Google has morbidly announced their afterlife data management called the Inactive Account Manager.

The tool, which is available on your Google Account settings page, will let you determine exactly what to do with all your data in the event you don’t log in for a determined period of time (3 months, 6 months, 9 months, or 1 year). You will have the option to either allow Google to delete all of your data in one fell swoop or transfer ownership of your digital footprint over to a trusted relative, confidante, or total stranger.

The services indicated to take advantage of this transfer/deletion tool are +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube.

For those of you out there who might panic that Google will inadvertently delete all your data because you won a one year, all expenses paid trip around the world, you can set the tool so that it will notify you before it does anything.

Might I suggest that you don’t use your Gmail address for the message?

For Your Eyes Only (and the IRS?)

Breathe while reading your email!

In a blog post by Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney at the ACLU, it looks like Big Brother Government feels they have the right to read your emails without a warrant. How serious is this? Probably pretty serious, since it flies in the face of the Fourth Amendment (as confirmed by the 6th Circuit Appeals Court) and a portion of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). The the exclusions are email that has been opened but left on a server more than 180 days (considered to be abandoned) and email that is unopened. These two specific instances do not require a warrant. In the golden days of POP3 email delivery, where a user was expected to download every message, some of this made sense (except the unopened email part). However, in these days of remote mail access and nearly endless on-line data storage, it doesn’t.

This being said, Mr. Wessler admits that the documents don’t explicitly indicate that the IRS can bypass the constitutional requirements for probable cause and judicially sanctioned warrants. Conversely, they don’t say that the IRS can’t either. Before the 6th Circuit Appeals Court’s findings, the IRS’ own Search Warrant Handbook indicated the following:

“the Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on a server, because internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.”

Folks can say what they want about the ACLU, mostly because of their continued work to maintain the separation between church and state, but I am personally thankful that they are helping to uphold our guaranteed rights.