Court Says College Can Snoop On Students' Email

from the no-privacy-violation dept

There have been plenty of cases where courts have said that it's okay for an employer to snoop on (employer-provided) employee email accounts. And now there's a case saying basically the same thing for colleges and universities. As long as they provided the email system, there's apparently no violation of anti-snooping or data privacy laws . I definitely understand the reasoning here, though one might argue that the relationship between a student and a university is quite different than an employee and employer. And I could see how students might have a much higher expectation of privacy. Still, do students really use university email addresses any more, or do they have their own primary email accounts that they had before heading off to school?

Filed Under: college, email, privacy, snooping, universities