RC Question 1 Explanation
DISCUSSION: The author gives us an overview of several issues related to email privacy. The issue is unsettled.
The author never says what we should do. The passage is just a neutral description of a current legal issue.
(Don’t get confused by the phrase “the only solution” on lines 53-54. The author is just saying that encryption is the only solution for users who want absolute privacy.)
___________
- The author never said we should scramble email. They said it’s the only way to guarantee privacy.
Also, this answer leaves out the debate over government email. - The author never said if we should extend phone privacy to email. And an individual certainly shouldn’t treat an email conversation as private, because it isn’t.
- The author gave government and business as examples, but never drew a clear distinction between them. For example, do govt workers have an expectation of privacy in their communications? The passage only covered when govt workers are allowed to delete documents.
- CORRECT. The author spent the entire passage explaining some of the debate around email privacy. This best sums everything up: the issue is unsettled.
- The author never said whether any supervisor should be allowed to monitor email.
Isn’t the issue settled in the case of the private sector? The courts ruled that if you own the communications, or if they’re internal, there is no reasonable expecation of privacy. This question really confused me since I ruled out C because it seemed that there was a clear, general answer for the private sector
Are you getting that from the passage or from your own knowledge? Outside knowledge is useful for generating hypotheses but you can’t use it to say what must be true. Possible I missed it but I didn’t see a general statement that no business communication can ever have an expectation of privacy.
That said I think I misread C. Looking at it again I think they mean govt and private sector work. I misread business as referring to actual businesses. Am going to put this in the rewrite queue, thank you.
I think my impression of the issue being settled for private cases comes from the last paragraph where it talks about internal communications, and the earlier paragraph where it talks about the court ruling the wrongful termination suit in favor of the employer. I think there is an ambiguity here since it never gives a counterexample to show the issue is unsettled, but it also never expressly states that the issue is unsettled. Unsettled just seemed strong to me since the passage never gave an example of the courts ruling any other way in cases of private business.
You’re correct that the passage doesn’t provide examples of courts ruling in favor of employees on privacy issues, nor does it explicitly state that the issue is unsettled in the private sector.
However, the absence of counterexamples or explicit statements does not imply a clear, general legal answer for the private sector. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary. Lines 46-47 state that no laws exist addressing authorization for inside interception. The court ruled in favor of the automotive company because it owned the computer system. Additionally, line 50 mentions that interoffice communications are private only if there is a “reasonable expectation of privacy.”
Imagine if a company owns its computer system yet its interoffice communication meets this reasonable privacy expectation, do we have a clear, legal answer based on the facts of the passage? I don’t think so. The passage confirms that no laws address this matter, indicating that the legal issue remains variable and unsettled.