It’s not, but with government workers it becomes a PR problem for the government. You’ll have congressional (or local government) investigations, demands that people be fired, etc. None of that’s fair, but politicians will cater to the few noisy puritans.
Yes, but the key word in your sentence is “they,” meaning the people that you actually provide with your email address.
The fact that you give them an email address so they can communicate with you does not mean that you consent to have that email address and all its associated personal details, including your membership of the site, made public for the world to see.
By your logic, the fact that the IRS has my email address (i signed up so i can check my tax return status online) means that it’s OK for someone to post my SSN and all of my tax information for the world to see.
Is it? That would be unusual.
I use my work email to communicate with my kids’ daycare. It is the fastest and best way to get in touch with me when I am in court, etc… I can’t imagine HR giving me too much grief over that.
Yes. Oh hell yes. 
And once again you are wrong.
I don’t think that I’ve ever used a company email address for personal business, but I can access my personal email on my phone so I wouldn’t need to use my business account.
Some people may not have cellphones or may have flip phones with no email access so I guess I can see using it for something harmless such as llcoolbj77 using it for the kids’ daycare. Using it to arrange extramarital affairs is of course a whole different thing.
I’m pretty certain that employers have the legal right to read any email sent or received using a company address, although that might vary by jurisdiction.
I don’t know if you’re being serious or sarcastic, but for me personally, seriously fuck that guy
Hey Josh! You should come over to the Straightdope forums. A lot of people here want to fuck you!
Sarcastic. 10 will get you 1, anyway. Bricker usually it is pretty squarely in favor of scrupulous fairness, so I suspect he thinks the pile on Josh Duggar while other victims get sympathy is bullshit.
Not me, though. Sometimes seeming hypocrisy trumps narrow consistency.
Depends on the company. Most places I’ve worked have an Acceptable Use Policy that says something along the lines of limited personal use being OK. They usually mean that you can email your family or your kids’ school or something if you need to. Or you can go online shopping during your downtime or something. Sometimes it varies by role. My current company allows limited personal use for the majority of employees, but if you’re in certain roles (providing IT services to customers) no personal use is allowed at all.
In my last job (where “limited personal use” was allowed in the AUP), I monitored employee emails. If I saw a few emails back and forth between an employee and Ashley Madison, I’d probably ignore it. If the employee was exchanging multiple emails a day, I might raise it to HR or the manager or whoever. That was privte sector. Government sector may be different.
I’ve worked in many levels of government, and at every single level I have been required me to take ethics classes. These classes cover such things as; Can I accept a free cup of coffee?, What do I do if I win a prize at a convention?, Does accepting a doughnut constitute a meal?. In all these classes it is emphasized that your computer, your time, and even the bandwidth are paid for by the public and are not to be used for private business. Does it happen? Yes. Is anybody really checking? No, but government acceptable use policies are pretty tight.
My past 4 companies had occasional personal use of IT equipment that is non disruptive and work appropriate as explicitly deemed acceptable. They expect you to check your email, arrange your appointments, etc. Privacy over work emails is never expected.
From my old employer
Why would any of you believe the hackers are telling the truth? As in, “we only put in the emails of the cheaters and no one else, we promise!” Do you have actual evidence or is it “dur, people be stupid, yup.”
Heh, heh. The Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, wikileaks defense.
Governments cares, especially if you have a security clearance and could be blackmailed for espionage purposes. Happened numerous times. Private companies are also also vulnerable to industrial espionage.
As a former govt. drone, we had guidelines for personal use: Family communications on a limited basis, web surfing on lunch breaks and outside work hours but no streaming or excessive downloads.
Yeah, but it’s also kind of fucked-up that employers would be out scrounging through that data to find their employees on it, or that a-hole co-workers are out doing it, and then ratting people out to their employer.
If it was a matter of reading the emails and noticing the domain they were coming from, they’d have probably been found out well before the scandal.
But this announcement by the Plano city government only came out after this data became public, so someone had to go look this stuff up deliberately.
Well, I’m sure a lot of embarrassed spouses will be taking that line this weekend.
But a bunch of people with AM accounts have confirmed that their info is in the leak, so at least the leak contains the real data. Of course, its possible that the leaked data is real, but the hackers added fake accounts to embarrass people. However, given the number of records the details contained in many of them, it doesn’t seem particularly plausible that that’s the case.
There’s a pretty big difference between exposing illegal actions by the government and ones that you personally think are unethical. Did you know that people who have an affair aren’t necessarily going behind the backs of their spouses to do so?
Do you feel it is equally justifiable to hack a Planned Parenthood or gay hookup database and post information based on it’s patrons?
If we’re talking about consequences there’s another issue that hasn’t been mentioned much.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/ashely-madison-hack-no-joke-leak-puts-thousands-women-lgbt-risk?sc=fb
I don’t think anyone here is going to say that this guy deserves whatever he gets.