A topic that’s remained hot ever since people started sending emails is the question of who owns what.

Some questions about content ownership can be definitively answers while others are still unanswerable.

Here’s some of the more hotter questions and their answers.

Q: If my mail is stored on a third-party server (i.e. the internet), do I still own it?

A: Yes.

Google (Gmail) states:

Google does not claim any ownership in any of the content, including any text, data, information, images, photographs, music, sound, video, or other material, that you upload, transmit or store in your Gmail account.

Microsoft (Hotmail/Live) states:

..we do not claim ownership of the materials you post or provide on the service.

It doesn’t get any more cut-and-dry than that. What’s yours is yours.

Any respectable email provider will also follow suit in their terms of use for the service.

Q: If an email has a "this is a protected communication and may not be shared, etc." in the signature, what does that really mean?

A: Corporations of all sizes love putting those nastygrams at the tail of every email sent from within the company. It is in fact true – but only to a point.

Under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in the United States, emails are granted protective status for 180 days. After that point they lose that status. That’s where the "protected" part of the notice comes from.

The rest of the notice can be completely ignored. You can forward the email anywhere you want. You can post it on a web site or blog. You can basically do whatever you wish. The big nasty "don’t share this" crapola is not a requirement but rather a request to keep it private. And it is solely up to you whether to honor that or not.

Email signatures of this type are purposely written to make it appear as if the sender (the corp) owns it outright and that you can’t do a darn thing with it. Wrong. You can reply/forward/whatever. You’ve been "granted" the right the moment it lands in your inbox.

Q: Can a copyright claim be made solely from email and nothing else concerning who owns email content?

A: Tough to answer.

There are those who say that yes, anyone who sends a private email to you has absolute ownership of the content therein.

However there’s no such thing as a "private" email. It doesn’t exist; therefore no copyright exists.

But then there are those who say, "Well, my timestamp on the original email proves I wrote it originally." Not exactly. There is no way to prove you specifically wrote it. Someone else could have written the email and sent it thru your account on your behalf.

The argument after that is, "Well then, check my IP of the originating email! It’s from me!" Again, wrong. Someone else could have been using your IP at the time and there’s no way to prove otherwise.

You can quickly see how this can turn into a hot argument.

Basically put, if it’s not on physical record – meaning on paper and filed with the Library of Congress (usually from a Form TX) – the claim holds no validity whatsoever.

There are those who would vehemently disagree with me on that point and that’s okay. As time goes on, the lines between how much weight an electronic record has versus a physical record are becoming increasingly blurred.

My personal perspective is that if there’s any sort of content that I value and don’t want shared/stolen/whatever, I don’t email it, period. This is the standard advice I give anyone concerning protecting their own personal written works.

What do you think?

Do you truly believe you own everything in your inbox, or does someone else? Do you think you could "hold" a copyright claim solely from electronic messages only?

Let us know your thoughts on it.

I’ve mentioned this before but it bears mentioning again: Google Street Views freaks a lot of people out.  And I mean a lot of people.

This time it’s stirred up privacy concerns in Baltimore where some are getting a bit perturbed at the fact that no matter how much effort you put into your personal privacy on the internet, your house is still visible to anyone who wants to see it if in Street Views. And if your cars are in the driveway, those are visible as well.

The most interesting part about the article is that it states yes, you can make a request to have Google remove images of your home from its database, but technically they don’t have to; that’s the scary part. Fortunately the big G does honor requests without complaint.

Personally I feel it’s all too easy for a burglar to case properties using Street Views. All he or she has to do is go online and look for homes with obvious security flaws (which are plainly visible most of the time), mark target homes and that’s that. That’s just way too easy.

And for those who say, "I don’t worry, my home is secure!", that’s what most people say before their houses get broken into.

I do sincerely appreciate what Google Street Views does as a public good, however I can totally understand the privacy concerns.

Is your house on Google Maps Street Views? And if yes, does it bother you?

Let us know in the comments.

I learned about Google Latitude the day it was introduced but didn’t see it as particularly a news-worthy item primarily because other companies have already done this before, that being to "see where your friends are in real time".

What is news-worthy is that privacy advocates have already stated (yelled would actually be more appropriate) that the system it could could be a potential privacy minefield.

I can see the potential benefits of tracking where people are but I can also see its drawbacks.

An example benefit would be for tracking your children. Your child has a smartphone and you want to have an easy way to know where they are. Latitude would serve you well in that respect.

An example drawback: Google knows physically where you are whenever you use it. That’s a bit scary. I don’t see this technology as "cool" or innovative in that respect.

Hopefully people will understand the difference between "cool" and personal privacy when using this service.

Firefox users who are looking to either disguise or change the title of their tabs will want to take a look at the add-on, Page Title Eraser.

From the description:

The Page Title Eraser adds menu item to the page context menu and “Tools” menu items. “Right-click” menu includes a “Hide title” menu item now. Using this item you can hide/show tab and window titles and tab icon. Each tab has its independent instance of this item.

I find use for this tab because certain sites I use display just the record ID numbers in the title bar, so it makes it very hard to distiguish what I have open on each tab without jumping back and forth. With this extension I can rename the tab to exactly what I am looking at so there is no confusion.

Interestingly enough, the author wrote this extension because they didn’t want people looking over their shoulder:

I always open several tabs in a Firefox window, but I would not like other people see some of tabs labels. So I wrote the PTE extension which helps me to have such feature.

So you can use this to be sneaky as well.

As you may or may not know, Google has its own web browser and it’s called Chrome. When first released it was done so in beta form, but now it’s been at version 1 (out of beta) for a little while now, so I figured I’d give it another shot.

This version of Chrome is 1.0.154.36 (see screen shot below). I am running it on Windows XP Professional Edition Service Pack 3.

Continued

Very recently, Yahoo! announced it would limit some (keyword there) of its data retention to a sparse (and unheard of) 90 days.

Privacy advocates have been screaming loudly for a very long time that web companies – particularly search engines – hold on to data that can personally identify an individual for far too long.

The fact Yahoo has stepped up and laid down its own 90-day rule is a victory for privacy advocates. It’s a safe bet that Google and Microsoft will follow suit in short order.

When I say "sparse", I truly mean it. The previous data retention from Yahoo was 13 months. Google strips out some data after 9 months and Microsoft holds on to data for a whopping 18 months.

What does this all mean in simple terms?

For example, if you still use the same ISP you did 18 months ago, any search you performed on www.live.com (Microsoft) is still stored somewhere on a Microsoft server – even if you weren’t logged in with a Windows ID because the searches are recorded by IP as well as ID.

With Google, data is stored whether logged in with a Google ID or not, just like Microsoft. Every single Google search you’ve made from your home has been recorded and stored for the past 9 months.

For those that would say "Yeah, so?", consider how much web searching you do on the internet; it says a lot about who you are and possibly your family as well. Do you really want web companies privately researching you based on your search habits? Of course you don’t – but that’s what is happening at present, save for Yahoo.

Personally speaking I would applaud it if Google and Microsoft would adopt the same 90-day data retention Yahoo does. Fingers crossed.

Sometimes you may sign up for some type of service on the internet (instant messaging, social networking, etc.) that creates a public profile. And maybe later on you forgot to delete it. This could work against you later on especially if you have posted things in the past you forgot about.

See video below for more details.

A rather unique idea I ran across the other day is a site which allows you to send a one time ’self destructing’ message. Using Privnote, you simply create a message you want to send and it generates a link for you. You then email this link to whomever you would like to read the message. After they have read the message (by clicking the link), the message is automatically ‘destroyed’ so the link will not work anymore.

I really cannot think of a practical application for this, but it is a pretty interesting idea.

Although I know this is being echoed all over the internet I couldn’t resist writing about this one. The upcoming release of Internet Explorer 8 (now in Beta 2) has a privacy feature that the internet populous instantly dubbed “porn mode”. This feature is called InPrivate and what it does is that at the end of each session the browser will completely wipe browser/search history, cookies, fliled-in form data, cache, passwords.. everything.

For those interested, Firefox can do the same thing:

Above: The Privacy panel in FF3. Uncheck all boxes save or “Always clear my private data when I close Firefox”, and from the “Settings” button:

..check every box here.

But in a tip of the hat to IE8, IE does make it easier than to go thru all this crapola.

I’m sure FF will develop a way as easy to “go private” as IE does soon enough.

We live in a very inter-connected world today, a world where more and more of our lives take place on the Internet. As a result, pieces of our lives, or at least breadcrumbs of where we’ve been and what we’ve been up to, are left on servers across the Internet. And to illustrate that point, let me relay a quick story from Gnomedex.

Continued