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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

Also likely illegal in most of the world.

Where "likely" means "I'm not a lawyer so I'm just guessing here" and "most" means "I read on HN that Europe likes privacy."

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Where "likely" means "I'm not a lawyer so I'm just guessing here" and "most" means "I read on HN that Europe likes privacy."

Please don't be a jerk in HN comments, no matter how ignorant someone else is or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Though the delivery wasn't as polite as it could have been, I believe it was valid criticism.

HN commenters are responsible for delivering valid criticisms in ways that don't damage the container. A thoughtful explanation will be better received anyhow.

What does damage the container mean in this context?

You may be the first person who's ever asked that, even though I've been using that term for years [0]. By 'container' or 'commons' [0.5] I mean the capacity of this place to host thoughtful discussion and rich community interaction. An internet forum like HN is fragile [1]. It can easily succumb to flamewars and other destructive dynamics. When one user posts that way, it evokes more of the same from others. Actually it evokes worse from others, because they'll feel justified in striking back, and people always underestimate how hard they're hitting by 10x if not more.

If that happens enough, the best users—who don't want to read snark, aggression, petty spats, etc.—will leave, ceding the field to the commenters who do, eventually driving everyone else away and leaving a scorched-earth wasteland [2]. The classic death spiral of an internet forum.

HN started [3] with the idea of trying to avoid that outcome [4], or at least stave it off [5]. Think of it like a complex but fragile ecosystem that needs protecting. Since we all benefit from the ecosystem, we're all responsible for protecting it, much as you wouldn't leave a campfire burning in a dry forest, drive a 4x4 across a mountain meadow, litter in a city park, and so on.

The bonds that hold HN together are weak, because we only have access to tiny blobs of text that are open to misunderstanding. Users don't have relationships that can sustain disruption and still be repaired; the group is too large. Since the organism can't easily repair itself, it needs not to take too many hits in the first place.

Most of the damage is thoughtless rather than malicious. The solution is to become more conscious about the goal of the site and how to further it. This isn't really an ethical question. We're not telling people that they should be good (maybe they should, but who is an internet moderator to tell anyone that?) Rather, it's an optimization problem. We're trying to optimize the site for curiosity [6]. That requires overcoming the default tendencies of the internet, and for that we need to sustain a certain culture.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[0.5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[6] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

In the Netherlands there was a court case which ruled that an employer cannot just read an employees work email, as even work-related emails are considered private information.

There are some exceptions of course: if you notify the employee and have a justified reason you can check some emails. So it's not outright forbidden. It matters a lot on the case and what you did, exactly.

I'm not aware of the situation in other countries.

(In Dutch: https://www.cnvvakmensen.nl/nextnow/blog/2016/march/mag-de-b... and https://www.sprengersadvocaten.nl/publicaties/wanneer-mag-ee...)

I like this personally. I can have a private conversation with a coworker in the break room, why not by email? If I wanted to include my boss I would have CC'd her.

This is not the current state of the law in the US however.

Can an employer set up a microphone in the break area without letting you know?

Depends on the state. I believe there are several in which the answer is "yes".

https://www.justia.com/50-state-surveys/recording-phone-call...

Also, depends on to what extent that room can be considered public. (IANAL TINLA)

Moreover, a lot of computer systems in the USA, for decades, have included a message telling employees that their access and use of the computer may be monitored, which seems similar to me to a sign in the break room letting you know if video/audio recording is in progress...

If your boss wanted to be included, she could have Bcc'ed herself.

When he she or it, is a gsuite admin ;)

This is a large part of the justification in Europe - that the conventional expectations of (some degree of) privacy should extend into new mediums, because work makes up such a substantial part of our lives that employees need to accept that parts of employees private lives will happen at work, and they need to act accordingly.

Use your personal email accounts. Problem solved.

Ask the former secretary of state how well that went for her.

It's not always an option, even if they can't read your email casually, your company may still have perfectly legitimate reasons to keep it under their control for reasons of auditing etc.

In some of the regulated organisations I’ve worked in, every single piece of email, web, or IM traffic has been scanned. At a minimum for DLP and malicious content reasons, and usually by profanity/obscenity filters too. How could that possibly work with such a regulation? Every communication is read, at a minimum by a computer, and if you trigger an alert, it will usually be read by a human being as well. If such a regulation allowed for that to take place, then it would be a very weak privacy regulation. If it didn’t allow for that, then it would interfere with the basic compliance requirements of a lot of industries.

So it turns out you're wrong and the GP is right. Of course it's technically possible, but not legally. Many European countries do have these protections, even in the fairly privacy lax UK it is illegal to read employees emails unless you have a reasonable reason to be doing so.

Even if you do have a good reason, perhaps they're ill, you're not allowed to open them if it's obviously not from a business contact or it's obviously a private email. So reading an email from an employee's spouse or girlfriend would be illegal.

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