The US Court of Appeals in Massachusetts has just ruled that email does not qualify for the same privacy protection as telephone calls or snail mail. The now-defunct online book company, Interloc, argued that since customers' email was temporarily stored on Interloc computers, they had every right to examine and print them if they chose. Frighteningly, the court agreed. Why was Interloc reading emails? It turns out that they were intercepting emails to and from Amazon.com, probably to ascertain what new marketing tactics Amazon was using. Fat lot of good it did them in the end, but that's little solace, considering that this means employers, ISPs, and any company at all can now argue that your emails were examined because they were passing through their servers.
Read more from the Washington Post.