E-MAIL USE AND PRIVACY CONCERNS

1. E-MAIL USEAND PRIVACY CONCERNS BY VUONG HOANG SOC 430 – FALL 06

2. INTRODUCTION • The most popular electronic communication technology in recent years has been email. • Email provides a convenient and fast way to telecommunicate and exchange information. • As email has become the primary tool for communication and information exchange,it also becomes the target place for privacy invasion and information piracy. • Email’s history, use and privacy concerns are discussed in this presentation.

3. DISCUSSION SCOPE • Email at work, school and home. • Email over intranet or internet.

4. BRIEF HISTORY OF E-MAIL (Wikipedia) • Electronic mail ("e-mail" or “email”) is a store and forward method of composing, sending, storing, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems. • The first one-to-one email system was begun at MIT in 1961. • Multiple-user email started in 1965, but only within the same network. • The users could transfer message across different networks by 1966.

5. BRIEF HISTORY OF E-MAIL (cont.) • In 1971, Ray Tomlinson initiated the use of the “@” sign to separate the names of the user and the network domain. • In the 1980s, the IETF (The Internet Engineering Task Force) developed a protocol called the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), which has become the standard method for e-mail transfer on the Internet today.

6. HOW E-MAIL WORKS • Simply describing, the message (may have attachments) is first converted to a text file, then using email client to extract from the sender’s server to the receiver’s server. The receiver uses the email client to download the message and then convert into text (and attachments if included). The entire process may take only seconds to complete. • For more detail how it works visit: http://www.howstuffworks.com/email.htm

7. PRIVACY CONCERNS • While the message is staged on the internet server, it becomes accessible to others, thus vulnerable to hackers.

8. RISKS of EMAIL USE • Personal information piracy, including identity theft – leading to more criminal activities • Proprietary information piracy (stealing of company-owned designs and/or sensitive information) – give way to industrial espionage • Spam mails (unsolicited usually commercial email sent to a large number of addresses) • Phishing (a scam by which an e-mail user is duped into revealing personal or confidential information which the scammer can use illicitly)

9. MORE RISKS … • Virus spread (a computer program that is usually hidden within another seemingly innocuous program and that produces copies of itself and inserts them into other programs and usually performs a malicious action such as destroying data) • Spy wares (software that is installed in a computer without the user's knowledge and transmits information about the user's computer activities over the Internet)

10. SEMIOTIC: PRIVACY POLICY • Work: company’s privacy policy • “Use of [company] resources does not provide employees an expectation of privacy. If an employee wishes that an activity remain private, he/she should not use [company] resources.”

11. SEMIOTIC: PRIVACY POLICY • School: school’s privacy policy • “WSU respects the privacy of users and does not routinely inspect or monitor use of computing and networking resources. However, WSU does not guarantee the security and privacy of any user's electronic mail and/or electronic files. Electronic mail can easily be misdirected or forwarded to others. For these reasons, it is not advisable to send information in electronic mail that you would not want to be distributed to others.”

12. SEMIOTIC: PRIVACY POLICY • Home email service providers’ privacy policy • “Google's computers process the information in your messages for various purposes, including formatting and displaying the information to you, delivering advertisements and related links, preventing unsolicited bulk email (spam), backing up your messages, and other purposes relating to offering you Gmail.” “Google may send you information related to your Gmail account or other Google services.” • “Yahoo! collects personal information when you register with Yahoo!, when you use Yahoo! products or services, when you visit Yahoo! pages or the pages of certain Yahoo! partners, and when you enter promotions or sweepstakes. Yahoo! may combine information about you that we have with information we obtain from business partners or other companies.” “Yahoo! collects information about your transactions with us and with some of our business partners, including information about your use of financial products and services that we offer.” “We limit access to personal information about you to employees…”

13. CONCLUSION • Considering email’s tremendous impact on society, email has changed the way people communicate. However, there is no privacy protection by using email. • Cautions need to be used when emailing.

14. REFERENCES • Wikipedia, “E-mail”.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#_note-0 • Wikipedia, “ARPANET”.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET • Google privacy policy http://mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en/privacy.html • Yahoo privacy policyhttp://privacy.yahoo.com/ • Company privacy http://www.firstgov.gov/ • Webster dictionaryhttp://www.webster.com/ • Washington State Universityhttp://www.wsu.edu/ElectronicPolicy.html

15. QUESTIONS?