Employees, in the course of their daily work, cannot avoid using the company’s IT facilities. They send and receive private emails aside from the business-related ones, which are considered official. For an indefinite period of time, emails received by employees might stay in their inbox. Private emails are supposed to be only for the employee’s own personal use.

Problems might come up if an employer needed to access an employee’s email account during the employee’s prolonged unavailability or absence. This could entail legal implications when employers open their employee’s emails. The German Higher Labor Court ruled early this year that an employee’s work-related email correspondence can be reviewed by his or her employer. The provisions of the “secrecy of telecommunications” do not apply in this case because although the employee was permitted to use the employer’s email facilities, the employer cannot be considered a “provider of telecommunication services”.

There was a case when an employee was absent from work due to a long-term illness. The employer, despite repeated efforts, was not able to obtain the employee’s permission. The employer then opened the employee’s email account, but did not read emails marked “private”. There were two qualified witnesses present when the employer opened the account. The employer read and printed only those emails that were business-related.

More and more people entrust some important aspects of their lives on the internet. This is because many people share their personal information when they do online shopping or join social networking sites. However, a point is reached when they sense that they have made some online mistakes. What they want to do now is to remove those unwanted portions of their internet footprints. Specifically, they want to remove information they shared that should have been kept private.

This is a result of mindless sharing of personal information. Since they have realized their mistakes, they are now asking for a kind of internet “eraser tool”. Some groups are working towards the passing of legislation that would allow users to easily remove their unwanted data from the internet. Users should have thought of this before they decided to upload their data because now it is too late.

The issue on “the right to be forgotten” is now becoming more intense and popular. In fact, it has begun taking a foothold in some countries. Some have even given a hint of creating an enforceable law of this kind. One direction is headed towards making it possible for users to demand removal of any information about them online. For instance, criminals, after serving their terms could be given the right to demand removal of their criminal histories that were posted on the internet.

A 23-year-old man was sentenced to six years imprisonment for computer intrusion, false impersonation and possession of child pornography. George Bronk was accused of and pleaded guilty for violating the online privacy of women. His six-year sentence was promulgated by the state attorney general’s office. A probation officer recommended that he should serve four years instead.

Using his computer skills, Bronk was able to intrude into the Facebook accounts of some women. He then searched for explicit photos and videos of his victims. After finding some nude and semi-nude materials, he forwarded those to the women’s contact lists.

Bronk’s case was described by prosecutors as “stalking the women”. By accessing their accounts, he was able to change their email passwords. Taking control over their accounts, he was able to have some online conversations with them. It was found out that he intimidated at least one woman to send him some more of similar photos. He also threatened the women to distribute the pictures that he already had if they would not give in to his demands.

Deep packet inspection is the process of capturing your Internet communications and reading through it.  When you send an e-mail or surf the web, your Internet communication is much more than just the e-mail or web page you visit.  It contains all types of Internet headers that detail the communication and formatting as well as the actual e-mail or web page.  For the average person, most of this is completely unintelligible.  Deep packet inspection tools can strip out the extraneous information used by your computer and the Internet.

The problem is that in these packets is plenty of personal or confidential information.  You could have anything from log in information to financial data.  This is one of the ways that criminals steal your identity, access your accounts or find out way too much about you.

It looks like the US government is looking at the danger of deep packet inspection.  According to CIO magazine, Congress is looking at making this illegal.  Interesting enough, no one admits to performing deep packet inspection on your Internet communications.  However, your ISP, your employer and criminals have the ability to perform this inspection.

There is a solution today however.  We do not need to wait on the U.S. Congress.  You can use an anonymous proxy to encrypt your Internet communucation that can delay or defeat deep packet inspection.

As always, the key to digital privacy is to protect your privacy yourself.  Do not rely on others.  Privacy is taken, not given.

Here is an AP article to update you on the technology forum in Brazil.

Here is a summary of the decisions made regarding the U.S. control over the Internet:

-None

Thank you and good night….

Anyway, no real action has been made in regulating the Internet, especially the U.S. control of the Internet. The only thing anyone knows right now is: “With no concrete recommendations for action, the only certainty going forward is that any resentment about the American influence will only grow as more users from the developing world come online, changing the face of the global network.”

It seems that the Russian representative took charge and requested “‘practical steps’ for moving Internet governance ‘under the control of the international community’” be made. Thanks for the heads up Russia…I thought this was the Brazil forum on introducing new lattes to Starbucks, err….never mind.

Brazil chimed in with the notion to make ICANN independent [of the U.S.] and wanted “more concrete recommendations out of the forum.”

So a big day in the tech world. Soon some “practical steps” will be presented as well as some other “concrete recommendations.” But as of today….no one has done anything about anything. Way to go ladies and gentlemen.

How can a global community be expected to govern the Internet when this forum can’t come up with anything? Basically, they met to say that for next time have some ideas. Sounds like a group of college students doing their final project. Great…