Your emails are not private S. Carolina Supreme Court ruled.
The South Carolina Supreme Court has ruled a man’s privacy was not violated when his wife’s daughter-in-law managed to get into his email and find out the name of his lover because the messages remained in his inbox.
In their unanimous ruling, the justices decided the woman did not violate a 1986 federal law about email storage and ruled a lawsuit from the husband could not go forward.
But the justices also pointed out that just because they ruled the woman didn’t violate the husband’s privacy, it didn’t mean they liked what she did.
“This should in no way be read as condoning her behavior,” Associate Justice Kaye Hearn wrote in her opinion.
The justices wrote three separate opinions, but all pointed out how a 26-year-old law written when email was in its infancy is a hard guide to use for today.
The Stored Communication Act makes a hazy distinction between obtaining emails that have not been read or messages that have been read and stored elsewhere versus emails that have been read and remain in an inbox.
Nearly all 14 pages of the Supreme Court’s ruling deals with trying to sort out those distinctions with a law that reads in part: “Electronic mail is a form of communication by which private correspondence is transmitted over public and private telephone lines … if the addressee is not a subscriber to the service, the electronic mail company can put the message onto paper and then deposit it in the normal postal system.”
In Jennings v. Jennings, handed down today, the Supreme Court of South Carolina considered this question in the context of access to opened e-mails held by Yahoo!. The case involves a domestic dispute. A husband was cheating on his wife, and the wife’s daughter-in-law figured out the husband’s e-mail password and logged in to his personal account to read the e-mails between the husband and his paramour. The daughter-in-law found the e-mails and shared them. The husband filed suit under several laws including the Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S.C. 2701, which only allows a civil suit if the e-mails accessed were in “electronic storage.” Electronic storage is defined in 18 U.S.C. 2510(17):
(A) any temporary, intermediate storage of a wire or electronic communication incidental to the electronic transmission thereof; and (B) any storage of such communication by an electronic communication service for the purposes of backup protection of such communication.
In the Jennings case, all five Justices agreed that the e-mails viewed by the daughter-in-law were not in “electronic storage” under the definition. But they divided sharply as to why, with no view getting a majority. Here’s the break down:
Two Justices — Justice Hearn, joined by Justice Kittredge — argued that the Yahoo! e-mails were not in electronic storage because there was no evidence that Jennings had ever downloaded any other copies. Because there were no other copies, the copy stored with Yahoo! could not logically be a backup, as the word “backup” presupposes the existence of another copy.
Two Justices — Chief Justice Toal, joined by Justice Beatty — rejected this reading of “backup” and would instead conclude that the e-mails are not backups because they were not made by the ISP for ISP purposes.
Finally, Justice Pleicones largely agreed with the Chief Justice’s opinion but had a different view of the relationship between (A) and (B).
The act “is ill-fitted to address many modern day issues, but it is this Court’s duty to interpret, not to legislate,” Chief Justice Jean Toal wrote in her own opinion.
http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20121010/PC16/121019904/sc-supreme-court-inbox-emails-may-not-be-private