[Spambayes] Breach of Privacy

[Thomas Mark]

I have talked with our IT department here and they now recognize and confess
to the fact that they have let slip certain confidential documents without
consent. I was under the notion and I apologize that they had not done this.
I know that it is too late to take it back but I was wondering if there
would be any way to remove these messages from the public server.



-----Original Message-----
From: skip at pobox.com [mailto:skip at pobox.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2007 12:18 PM
To: Thomas Mark
Cc: spambayes at python.org
Subject: Re: [Spambayes] Breach of Privacy


    Thomas> I sent an e-mail earlier about some e-mails from my company to
    Thomas> your company regarding tech support. These e-mails found on
    Thomas> google.com contained confidential information and had
    Thomas> disclaimers as such in the e-mails. I have since found several
    Thomas> of these e-mails easily searchable on google.com and free for
    Thomas> the world to see. This puts my company at financial jeopardy as
    Thomas> we are held liable for content that was supposed to be kept in
    Thomas> private and via your servers with the rest of the world. 

Thomas,

I'm not sure where you got the idea that posting messages to a public
mailing list about an open source tool such as SpamBayes constituted private
communication with the tech support group of another company.  I presume you
subscribed to the list or at least visited the subscription page.  Right
there is a link to the mailing list archives.  Anyone can read them.  The
fact that you found your messages via Google is not surprising and
demonstrates how the system is supposed to work.  If Google found them then
Yahoo!, MSN and other search engines almost certainly found them as well.
In addition, email mirroring services will have them: Gmane, Google Groups,
etc.  Finally, I suspect you can find your messages via Alexa's Wayback
Machine.

The responsibility for using the technology appropriately rests with you.
The horse left the barn months ago.  Now you want someone else to close the
door.  That's not going to help.

-- 
Skip Montanaro - skip at pobox.com - http://www.webfast.com/~skip/