Show Me Your Email!
If you sign up for a social networking account, you can understand that the terms of service contain stuff like “you give us permission to publicly display your information for the purpose of providing you the service”. How would you feel if your email provider had the same in their TOS?
I was thinking about email today. I use email for everything and anything. My social networking goes on in my inbox. Work goes without saying. Personal stuff, too. I don’t use Facebook, nor Google+, and I only use Twitter to publish stuff from my blogs.
Now, I’ve always considered email the most private service on Internet. If there was one service on which my privacy would be absolutely protected it would be email, so I thought. But I guess it doesn’t hold true anymore. Here’s an excerpt from the TOS from an email provider I’m currently using (replaced company name with ‘ACME’):
“We respect your right to ownership of content created or stored by you. You own the content created or stored by you. Unless specifically permitted by you, your use of the Services does not grant ACME the license to use, reproduce, adapt, modify, publish or distribute the content created by you or stored in your user account for ACME’s commercial, marketing or any similar purpose. But you grant ACME permission to access, copy, distribute, store, transmit, reformat, publicly display and publicly perform the content of your user account solely as required for the purpose of providing the Services to you.”
So, the ACME service respect my ownership of the content, but they do get to ‘publicly display’… my email… I’m sure they didn’t mean it to come out that way, but it did, didn’t it? I don’t know if it makes sense at all. If I post on Facebook, I can understand that it is meant to be publicly displayed to a fairly large chunk of the public. And I understand that I need to give Facebook permission to do so. But what about email? It is decidedly not meant to be public. In fact, I use it specifically so that it doesn’t go public. Otherwise, I’d just tell everyone to watch my blog and post personal messages here, right? So I definitely don’t understand why “publicly display” has to appear in email (and office) SaaS provider’s TOS.
IANAL, but I checked the Y! Mail’s TOS and no such clause appears there, so it’s generally speaking (from IANAL perspective) ‘safer’ to use for email than the service I’m using right now. You only give Yahoo! permission to publicly display stuff that you upload to ‘publicly accessible areas’ which makes a lot of sense. Google has something similar in their TOS, but they aren’t as clear as Yahoo!. The FAQ says this: “We do require that you give us a licence to the content you post so that we can host it and, if you ask us to, make it available to others.” So, with my permission, they can post it publicly, but not without it.
As far as services accessing our email’s content, I believe Google does that to facilitate context-sensitive ads in Gmail. There’s also a service called GMX Mail that outright reads its users’ email (supposedly to facilitate their security). Such practice is not only undesirable, but should be alarming to most webmail users (I stopped using Gmail a while ago, and was kicked out of GMX because they believed that one of my messages, which they obviously read, violated their TOS.)
It would be very difficult to check each and every TOS out there to find a reliable email provider that would really care about the privacy of my email. However, it would be good to keep in mind that email isn’t as sacred as it used to be (if it ever were). Apart for self-hosting email, there is no telling what might happen to your messages. You might see them leaked publicly one day, and find yourself in a situation where you cannot even sue the company that leaked them because you gave them the permission to begin with…
