On 6/16/06, Siju George wrote:
Hi all,
I 've been told by people ( more than one ) off list how *uncivilized*
it is to forward *private* mail publicly *even when it has some bad
content*.
And I have been asked to apologize publicly ( not by Hank Cohen ).
Without trying to Justify my points any more I apologize doing this.
I am wrong. I accept it.
Sorry Hank. I know the damage is done. But I 'll make sure that it is
not repeated anymore.
And thank you so much for all who sent the mails of reproof and correction.
Thank you for taking effort to put me in the right track.
And thank you so much for all who silently put up with this misbehaviour.
You did nothing wrong.
Email is fundamentally not private unless and until (1) all the
correspondents have reason to trust one another, and (2) they mutually
agree to keep the correspondence private, and (3) the emails are
encrypted, or the emails are only private in a very trivial sense. (1)
is unlikely given that Mr. Cohen's email was in response to you
accusing him of lying. (2) is impossible since the email was
unsolicited. And I am guessing (3) was not the case.
While there is a wider variety circumstances than 1+2+3 in which it is
considered impolite to redistribute private emails, beyond that, it's
your call, and nobody should assume that you will keep their words
privileged (and I seriously doubt Mr. Cohen expected it). Furthermore,
only someone who fundamentally misunderstands the concepts of
reasonable assumption of privacy and conversational intimacy would
think that your posting of Mr. Cohen's unsolicited message qualifies
for this category of "extended impoliteness". And there are many such
people--just look at how many companies require universal use of
signatures stating things like "the contents of this message are
private" and "if you are not the intended recipient, you are required
to delete this message immediately and you may not use its contents".
At the risk of starting something that really would be off-topic, I
would like to point out that when people attribute privacy and
privilege where they do not exist, the notions of privacy and
privilege are degraded, and the ability of all people to enjoy those
things where they do exist is diminished.
We should focus less on being "civilized" and more on fulfilling our
obligations to one another, where those obligations exist. It is
largely due to the actions and inactions of "civilized" people that
many of those obligations are not fulfilled, every day, all over the
world. Please understand that I am not trying to knock etiquette,
which I think is very important because it provides a protocol with
which people can communicate. But as I have just argued, I don't think
that etiquette is a big issue in this case. I think calling an
unsolicited email from a company representative responding to a post
to a public mailing list addressing a former post to the same mailing
list by the company representative about a company matter "private" is
dangerous to our continued enjoyment of privacy. I further think that
encouraging people to keep private fundamentally non-private
correspondence has the effect of giving license to people to send
abusive and non-productive emails.
-Eliah
