Government Considers Email Private 180 Days

Electronic Frontier Foundation Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick was cited in Nancy Gohring's August 6, 2009 ComputerWorld column regarding the government's view of the privacy of personal email:

The EFF argues that as with a letter or a phone call, the content of an e-mail should be protected. "The government argues different," she said. The government believes that if you've opened an e-mail and left it on the server, they can access it without a warrant. In addition, if a user leaves an e-mail on a server for more than 180 days, officials don't need a warrant to retrieve it.


But the reasoning behind that policy, set in the 1986 act, is antiquated, she said. "The theory is, in 1986 if you left something lying around that long it was like garbage, it wasn't important to you. Now we know that with Gmail and cheap storage it's quite the opposite. You keep stuff that's important to you and throw away what's not," she said.

-D.D.