E-mail Privacy

[Tim Chown]

In <3651 at happym.WA.COM> josh at happym.WA.COM (Joshua_Putnam) writes:

>Absent an ironclad guarantee of privacy, I have no right to assume any 
>files on the company's computer are absolutely inviolable.  If regular 
>backups are made and kept, I have no reason to believe they will not 
>be used.  Even if the company provides nominally private personal 
>directories to employees, employees should remember that their files 
>may be viewed accidentally by administrators (who should keep quiet 
>about what they see in such cases). 

Sometimes the mail system, sendmail in our case, fails due to an
error of some sort.  It's quite rare but as our postmaster I
redirect failed headers to me so I can attempt to prevent
similar failures and notify senders/intended recipients
of the problem and perhaps the cause.

Anyway, as a result I saw a message between two students that
was clearly showing them to be cheating in an assigment by exchanging
pieces of code.  I only saw the subject line, but it was enough.
Do you turn a blind eye?  Do you let the offenders gain an unfair
advantage?  It's not at all clear cut.  We have correlation software
written as the basis as a PhD that checks for collaboration on the
structure of code, but when you have the extra "proof" should you
root (literally ;-) around further?  Tricky.

Tim
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