Re: Confidentiality notices on email messages

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Randall Gellens wrote:
Barry,

I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one on TV or the net, so I likely don't understand the situation. As a point of possibly interesting information, once upon a time, at a training session held by a lawyer regarding how to protect confidential information, we were admonished not to slap a "confidential" label on anything automatically or without consideration, because, we were warned, doing so can cause the label to lose meaning for everything. In other words, if we labelled everything "confidential," then we were really saying nothing was confidential.

Ever since, I've wondered if these notices were set up by someone who is a lawyer and does understand the situation, or if they were set up by someone who saw others do it, or heard that this sort of thing was needed.

Depending on the organization, it may be a legally required especially if it is public stock company. It is also legally required to make an explicit statement in order to have stronger enforcement when push comes to shove, i.e. ignorance can not be claimed. There is also a difference in PUBLIC vs PRIVATE communications and while it is more important to have disclaimers when public, unless an explicit statement is also made in private, it can not be assumed. A good example is a private message send to someone and he/she makes it public. In tort cases, the receiver has to right to make it public if and only if the author did not make an explicit statement that it remains private and the guideline is to make it the very first statement: THIS IS A PRIVATE MESSAGE AND THE INTENTION IS THAT IT REMAINS PRIVATE. MAKING THIS MESSAGE PUBLIC WILL VIOLATE US EPCA "User Privacy Expectation" PROVISIONS.

IMV, the IETF will be opening up a can of worms if they begin to cite legal conflicts with the NOTE WELL statement and if its suggested that participants use external addresses in order to participate without conflict, well, even if people took the advice, it may put the person in some legal conflict with his corporate employer. e.g. just because a person moonlights in some other activity, does not necessary mean they are free from company employment contracts and if there is any kind of relationship of his external activities with his normal work, they might want him to use a corporate identity or not. I guess it all depends how much of a hard ass is his boss, employer or their chief counsel. You might find if the IETF is making a fuss, they may ask the employee to just not participate - lurk, but don't post.

--
Hector Santos, CTO
http://www.santronics.com
http://santronics.blogspot.com



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