How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO • Hacker News Board

Re: How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO

#21

Post by Silhouette » Sun, Mar 20, 2011, 9:30 PM UTC

ig1 wrote: post #14

brown9-2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree about some of your points, but I don't believe that you have any reasonable expectation of privacy when emailing a person you have never communicated with before or that they won't republish your emails without first gaining your permission (IANAL).

I don't know about in the US but in the UK it's certainly the case that there's a default expectation of privacy.

As much as I'd like to think that's true (being in the UK and a privacy advocate myself) I've never seen anything that would "certainly" describe the legal position in this case, such as a precedent from a case in one of the higher courts. Are you just talking about something like the general privacy right under the ECHR, or something more specific to e-mail?

I've found various opinions on-line from UK-based commentators suggesting that if an e-mail isn't explicitly marked or otherwise understood to be confidential, and it didn't contain any sort of privileged information or information that would normally be expected to remain private, then it wouldn't automatically attract protection under any privacy law. Most of these related to an individual republishing messages send on behalf of a corporate body rather than the other way around, though.

Re: How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO

#22

Post by ig1 » Sun, Mar 20, 2011, 9:48 PM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #21

ig1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about in the US but in the UK it's certainly the case that there's a default expectation of privacy.

As much as I'd like to think that's true (being in the UK and a privacy advocate myself) I've never seen anything that would "certainly" describe the legal position in this case, such as a precedent from a case in one of the higher courts. Are you just talking about something like the general privacy right under the ECHR, or something more specific to e-mail? I've found various opinions on-line from UK-based commenta…

There's nothing email specific, although a company couldn't republish an email from an individual without breaching the data protection act.

If the information in an email has no indication (explicit or implicit) that it should remain private, then I agree there's no legal reason why the recipient can't disclose the information from the email

Re: How not to interact with the media - Hashable CEO

#23

Post by tptacek » Sun, Mar 20, 2011, 9:54 PM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #20

tptacek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter how much you focus your nerd powers, you are not going to prove that's it's unlawful for a reporter, having received an email addressed to the reporter , to report on that email. Please stop trying.

You did read the article I posted that was written by a lawyer , right? Or spend even two minutes Googling for similar articles by other lawyers ? I think one of us is trying to convince himself that he's right despite the absence of any supporting data, but I'm afraid you might be mistaken about which of us it is.

I'd respond to your article with quotes to point out how you're misunderstanding it, but I might violate its copyright and subject myself to needless lawsuits. (You can have the last word now; I'll stop being snarky in response.)