Netiquette Banner Netiquette, by Virginia Shea, page 126

get garbled, the sysadmin may be able to restore them. If you forget your password, the sysadmin can do a "reset" and give you a new one.

A system administrator with any sense of ethics -- or even one who's reasonably busy -- won't routinely read other people's mail. But it's not a safe assumption that all sysadmins are too honest or too overworked to snoop.(Endnote #31)

The privacy problem extends beyond nosy sysadmins. The technology needed to automatically screen large volumes of email is widely available. (Endnote #32) Sometimes, as a matter of company policy, businesses routinely screen employees' email. To make matters worse, agencies of the federal government can readily monitor vast quantities of email, automatically searching for key words.

Perhaps even more common than active snooping is human error. Here are some of the things that can happen:


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