You know when you get a one line email from someone, and beneath it several thousand automatically generated words of pseudo-legal bullshit?
And here’s another piece of bandwidth-chugging server-cramming spam-text:
Fuck I so hate this.
The information contained in this communication may be privileged and/or confidential and is intended only for the individual to whom it is addressed or agent responsible to deliver it to the intended recipient. If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify us by
telephone.
I work for a law firm. I suspect they know what they are doing. Remind me not to send you any emails. 
My wife works for a health insurance company, and emails back and forth with providers several times a day, including potentially privileged information about the insured. The so-called bandwidth waste is something that keeps her company from being sued just in case she typos an email address…say, jsmith@msn.com as opposed to jsmyth@msn.com.
Sorry it inconveniences you to have a bit extra added to the sig. I’ll have her quit her job immediately so that we don’t waste your bandwidth:rolleyes: Or then again, they could raise your health insurance premiums in order to settle law suits rather than make your hotmail load slower.
Aww, hell, on preview I want to add this–those email addenda (pudenda, sex offenda?) wasted less internet bandwidth than your rant and the ensuing replies (including mine).
I too detest the vague threat that if you receive the mail in error, then you’re guilty of something.
Bullshit - if you send me something in error I’m going to read it and enjoy.
Disclaimers are bandwidth theft!
[sub]Disclaimer: I was going to write a comedy disclaimer here, but I couldn’t be arsed.[/sub]
I somehow doubt that a little disclaimer at the bottom (where it won’t even be read until the person has already read the rest) of an email would actually prevent the insurance company from being sued if they went and sent someone’s medical records off to unauthorized people. Can anyone provide any cites of cases where someone actually successfully defended against a lawsuit for releasing PII on the basis that they had a little disclaimer at the bottom of the information they were supposed to keep private? It sounds like those ‘not responsible for damages’ signs - it may prompt someone who doesn’t know about the law not to file a suit in the first place, but they don’t actually provide protection in court.
Really, I find this kind of attitude from insurance companies pretty sickening but not suprising. ‘Oh, we don’t care about preventing some random Joe from seeing your medical records, but if we stick some magic words at the end we won’t get sued’.
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Well, then, it’s working, isn’t it?
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But, Skippy, they do care about it. The “magic words” are to cover their asses from human error. I can’t speak for the bigwigs, but my wife and her colleagues are very aware of the confidentiality of patient records–but even the most careful person in the world fucks up now and then, as you should be able to witness to.
But, really, let me know what company you work for, and I’ll be sure to attribute every fuck-up they make to you, and every corporate policy will be your doing. And G_d help you if you were a security guard at Enron’s Denver office, because it’s all your fault. Oh, yeah, and Dubya and Cheney.
It is rather stupid on my email lists, though, especially when arguing whether or not to plant Sarracenia oreophila in a cow pasture.
My law firm puts a disclaimer on its e-mails not to threaten your ass but to cover ours. Then if we accidentally send you incriminating or sensitive materials, and you publish them in the paper, we can at least say we did our best to alert you that what you were doing was wrong and to ask you not to do it. Would that provide a 100% defense in the event of hugely stupid or negligent conduct? No. But it’s better than nothing.
That said, our disclaimer is two or three sentences long. (Paraphrased: “This may be privileged. If it’s not intended for you, please tell us you got it by error and delete it.”) The sixty paragraph ones are annoying, I agree.
The best kind are the ones that are something along the lines of:
robin - I’ve never bothered with a sig on my emails before, but may I use that?
This e-mail cannot be reproduced without the expressed written consent of the National Football League.
Well now, had this email come from my previous company, you would have been correct.
Email communications are by their very nature insecure. Basically it bounces from server to server and you have absolutely no idea where it may eventually end up. If an insurance company, law firm, or medical provider ever emailed me with what I deemed to be my personal and confidential information you better believe they would receive a complaint and loss of my business.
When you consider how much we pay in insurance premiums, legal fees, and medical fees it definitely reflects poorly on companies that feel the need to avoid a 34-cent stamp and send out an email instead.
HIPAA is definitely poised to destroy medical providers that leak private and confidential medical records (even unintentionally), so we can definitely expect a lot of tightening up in that regard. I would suspect that emailing medical information is a definite “NO NO” when it comes to HIPPA.
I reckon the amount of money you save on stamps envelopes and a mail room is determined by the size of your mailing list.
It does seem that it would be merely courteous to snail mail personal information, though.
Oh, BS. I work with companies on privacy issues, I’ve read through surveys with them on what they want from software to handle privacy issues, I’ve seen their desires put into the specs for software. What they care about is whether they can get sued, not whether they keep people’s personal information personal. I’d love to find a single publicly traded corporation that had ‘we’d like to avoid releasing information we shouldn’t’ as a goal instead of ‘we don’t want to get our asses sued off’ (I don’t doubt that there are small companies that actually have privacy concerns instead of lawsuit concrens).
Going to turn up a case of ‘the magic words’ helping win a lawsuit, or are you just going to keep asserting it?
Then their procedures are broken and need to be fixed. If a company is tossing around personal information on unecrypted internet email without any checking on the recipient, they may be ‘aware’ of the confidentiality of patient records, but they’re obviously not concerned about it in the least. If they just did something as basic as encrypt the information in their emails, then the wrong person couldn’t even read the email!
What prompted this bit? I didn’t say a word about your wife, I talked about ‘insurance companies’, and it should be clear to anyone with half a brain that I was talking about company policies in general and not your wife in particular. If you’re going to take something directed at gigantic companies personally, you should make use of your insurance company.