An Internet Service Provider can legally search the e-mail that it processes. ISPs may lawfully search the content of users’ e-mails for many purposes, including assisting law enforcement, ensuring compliance with the ISP’s terms-of-use agreement and protecting the ISP from legal difficulties, to name a few. Such activities do not currently constitute an invasion of the e-mail user’s privacy.

An ISP may process — and, hence, read — e-mails containing medical, legal and other information that the sender may desire to keep confidential. The Internet’s protocol of passing e-mails through many computers, each of which copies (but does not necessarily delete) those e-mails, may result in access to confidential information by third parties simply because the Internet, when used as a communication system, is not designed to protect content privacy.

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