Mailinglist privacy: MY NAME ALL OVER GOOGLE!

Roland Smith rsmith at xs4all.nl
Fri May 6 07:01:20 PDT 2005


On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 05:39:34AM -0500, Fafa Hafiz Krantz wrote:
> 
> Hello.
> 
> I have a big problem. My privacy has been violated.
>
> I had no idea when I first started writing posts to the FreeBSD
> mailinglist that it would be archived, 

On the page where you subscribed to the list is a link to the
archives. The existence of such a link implies that an archive is being
kept. So you could have known there are archives.

Subscribing to a list means that you give permission for your messages
to be sent to all subscribers. Any one of those could save the messages,
creating an archive. So posting to the list implies permission for
archival.

> let alone indexed by Google so that the world can spy on my words.

Technically, e-mail can be easily copied on any server that it passes
through. So in effect, anybody who has access to one of the mail servers
that your messages pass through can read your mail. 

Some countries have laws concerning confidentiality of mail, and some
have enhanced these to include e-mail. Other governments routinely
intercept and scan e-mail traffic (google for "Echelon").

Unless you explicitly encrypt it, you should treat e-mail as a letter in
an open envelope instead of a private converstaion. 


Roland
-- 
R.F. Smith                           /"\    ASCII Ribbon Campaign
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