Confidentiality is a central issue in human subjects review of research proposals.
Any use of e-mail in research must take into account the fact that e-mail, in most of its forms, is not in any way confidential, and vastly increases the potential for breach of confidentiality, as the careers of any number of former government employees, former politicians, and former executives will attest.
Some of the reasons for this are technological: they are features of the way in which e-mail works, and the ease with which content can be, and is, copied, forwarded, and othwerwise dispersed over the networks that carry the data.
Other reasons are legal. For example, all e-mail messages that traverse UW systems have the status of "public documents," and are subject to extensive monitoring and reporting, as is made clear by the official notifications about privacy limitations.
For these and similar reasons, the minimum requirement is that, in each place that e-mail contact is solicited or suggested for research purposes, there be appended the warning, "Please remember that we cannot guarantee the confidentiality of any information sent by e-mail."
It is useful to remember that e-mail is not the only form of communication using the internet, and that other methods may be useful where e-mail is not.
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