How much privacy does a person have with an email account? Can any government agency go thru your inbox and look at what other people send to you or visa verse?
What about private companies that provide background checking for a fee?
It depends on your e-mail provider. They can certainly ask, but your provider might not provide access without a subpoena (which they won’t have for a routine background check). And I can’t imagine that there’s any company that would release it to a private investigator.
Alternately, they could try to hack in, but your provider would have to have pretty piss-poor security for that to work.
On the other hand, though, they likely can determine that you’re the one who just wrote that post, and the fact that you’re asking this question might, in itself, raise some red flags.
Private e-mail, like Gmail (not the corporate version) is considered private and no one can get a look at it without a subpoena. Law enforcement agencies certain can do it, but the average private eye/investigator isn’t able to get that information.
Your corporate e-mail is the property of the company you work for. They are allowed to look at messages and, of course, would have to answer a subpoena. But an investigator probably is not going to be allowed access (corporate lawyers would worry about liability).
Hacking is possible, but it’s usually illegal and will put the investigator in serious legal jeopardy.
(Bold added.)
You mean isn’t able to get that information legitimately, right? According to standard stereotype as I think I know it, a standard information-gathering tool in the P.I. toolkit is palm grease, and this works very well in all kinds of unexpected situations.
Is there much (or any) truth to that?
Anecdotally: my friend worked for Microsoft as Live tech support. He was able to access my hotmail account to list the names of all my custom subfolders (and proved it to me) and claimed the next level above could read messages.
I see no reason to doubt other email providers would do the same.
There’s probably no way to know for sure, but I doubt it’s common. Service providers are wary of potential lawsuits and security breaches; they use various technical means to limit access to private data and log unusual patterns of access. A system that would allow junior staff access to everything would be a big security risk.
I don’t work with email accounts but I do often see legal and law enforcement requests for data at a large web host. I’ve never once seen (or heard of) someone hinting at a bribe. On the other hand it’s very common for people to use lies and social engineering to try to get things they shouldn’t have.
For an ordinary, garden variety background check in the US, what they are typically checking is criminal history (arrests, convictions), credit (your credit score or specific items on your credit report), and/or reviews/references/confirmations from former employers.
I’ve never heard of a private background check that includes information about who you exchange emails with. I would never expect to see such a report:
John Doe - Background Check
Criminal -
05/12/2005 - Misdemeanor - DUI. Guilty. 2 months jail
01/02/2009 - Felony - Grand Theft. Guilty. 2 years prison
03/02/2012 - Felony - Murder. Not Guilty.
Credit -
Overall Score - 650
Delinquencies
04/02/2008 - Bank of Podunk. Late over 60 days. Balance $4,203.
Employment -
02/2000 to 05/2005 - Manager of Important Stuff - Conglom-O. Verified by J. Davis, HR.
01/2006 to 01/2009 - Front Desk, Department of Stuff - EdgeCom. Unverified - HR denied record of such employment.
Communication History -
02/2002 to Present - Regular communication with Sara McDonald. Content includes religious debate regarding the truth of the Bible.
05/2003 to 02/2005 - Member of Nancy Drew Fan Club mailing list.
02/2011 to 11/2012 - Regular communication with Jane Robinson. Content - romantic courting ending in vitriolic break-up letter.
How would a background check service gain access to your message board usernames? And is Facebook in the habit of divulging private data to the services?
I used to do email forensics… generally speaking, subpoenas and/or search warrants are required for that kind of thing.
Private companies don’t do that kind of thing legally, and the background check companies are all using publicly available data- stuff that you can get, but probably don’t have the wherewithal to search a whole bunch of that stuff and then index and correlate it.