Clif Notes: Where's My Yada-Yada?
On a recent flight, I was flipping through a copy of The Economist magazine. Not my usual entertainment material, but a guy has to have something to read until they allow him to turn his Kindle back on. I spotted a small article titled "Spare us the e-mail yada-yada." It was subtitled "Automatic e-mail footers are not just annoying. They are legally useless."
Annoying? I can certainly agree with that. I absolutely detest those big legal disclaimers automatically added to every outgoing e-mail a company's server sends. The article went on to point out what I have always suspected, that those disclaimers are totally worthless. I'm not a lawyer, but I know enough to know that you cannot unilaterally place someone else under contractual obligations that requires them to remedy your mistakes. "If you are not the intended recipient of this e-mail, contact the sender immediately."
Oh really? I don't think so. If a coworker went on vacation and was spiteful enough to set their e-mail to forward everything they receive to my inbox in their absence, and one of their bank statements comes in, that in some way is my fault? Of course if I misuse that information, say to renew his subscription to Goldfish Fetish Monthly, I may be engaging in a criminal act. But that is a crime against my coworker, not against the bank. There is nothing obligating me to call his bank and inform them that my coworker had set himself up for divulging his own personal information. And who's going to compensate me for the time I spend trying to explain to their Fraud Division how I got the information and why I am calling about someone else's account? Decency, of course, would require that I not peruse his bank statement. I would simply put it in a folder of such items and give them to him when he got back to work and turned his e-mail forwarding off. I probably wouldn't even point out the faux pas to him. His embarrassment is enough of a lesson.
The article continued by stating that legal experts on Internet policy say that no court case has ever had its outcome determined by these disclaimers. So I got to thinking that it might be an interesting topic to talk about. When I sat down to write this column, I thought it might be entertaining to give a few actual examples of the silliness you find in these things. I went back to my year-to-date e-mail archive and started sampling. Out of a couple thousand e-mails, I expected to find numerous examples of legal yada-yada.
I found one.
Apparently the use of these annoying e-mail footers has fallen off, at least among the companies that send me e-mail, including banks, travel reward programs, and the like. And yet I had gotten so used to completely ignoring them (another comment the article made about their ineffectiveness) that I didn't even notice when I stopped being bombarded with them. I find it disturbing when something that I know as a "fact" turns out not to be. I always wonder how many other things in my head are completely wrong. But either the e-mail that I receive is way skewed by reasonable companies, or the author of the article suffers from the same condition.
What was the one example I found? A blast-o-gram e-mail from New Scientist magazine inviting me to participate in a "write the winning humorous caption on this Mars photo and win a prize." The disclaimer went on with the usual insistence that I contact them immediately if I was not the intended recipient, dire civil and criminal penalties, and so forth. I hit the delete key.
I just hope they don't get upset about me divulging this information to you. I would hate to have them hunt me down and kill my puppy.
