Re: stds-802-mobility: Claims of Confideniality in E-Mail messages
Bob -
Chapter & verse on this is in the P&P of the Standards Board, as
pointed out revently by Stuart on the .11 list:
Within the IEEE-SA Standards Board
Operations Manual (2003),
HTML
or
PDF
format, as Approved by the IEEE-SA Standards Board December 2002
the paragraph below relates to the use of:
+++
4.1.1.5 Confidentiality
Statements and Copyright Notices on Communications
The IEEE-SA Standards Board and its
committees operate in an open manner. To that end, no material submitted
to the IEEE-SA Standards Board or its committees will be accepted or
considered if it contains any statement that places any burden on the
recipient(s) with respect to confidentiality or copyright. Any
communication, including electronic mail, containing language with such
restrictive wording will not be accepted or considered.
It should be noted that this policy
does not apply to IEEE copyrighted materials, such as draft standards. In
the event that copyrighted materials are to be incorporated in an IEEE
standard, an acceptable copyright release or assignment must be obtained
from the copyright owner prior to approval of the standard by the IEEE-SA
Standards Board.
+++
This is a rather stronger policy statement than your message
implies.
Regards,
Tony
At 17:09 31/07/2003 -0400, Robert D. Love wrote:
All,
Some of you have been sending messages to the
various 802.20 reflectors with notes like the following appended to your
email:
"The information contained in this electronic
mail message is privileged
and confidential, and is intended only for use of the addressee. If
you are
not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any
disclosure,
reproduction, distribution or other use of this communication is
strictly
prohibited. If you have received this communication in error,
please notify
the sender by reply transmission and delete the message without copying
or
disclosing it."
These statements have no place in IEEE 802 reflectors.
1) All of our email is posted on publicly accessible
websites. Therefore, the email will certainly not be restricted to
the "intended recipient".
2) It would be highly inappropriate to divulge
any confidential information on the reflector. In fact, any
confidential information should be formally turned down and denied a
place in 802.20 proceedings and archives.
3) Our processes are open specifically to avoid
any appearances or practice of collusion and price fixing.
Statements like the above are counter-productive to maintaining both the
fact and the appearance of openness in our Standards Development
process.
I realize that it may be a pain for some of you to get
your company to not automatically append such a notice on every email you
send out. However, you have an obligation in your work with IEEE
802 to neither provide nor imply that you are providing confidential
information.
Therefore,
1) Those of you that have sent messages with such a
statement, please send an email formally stating that the Confidential
statement that has appeared or may appear on your future notes is
incorrect.
2) Please work with your company to find some way of
sending notes to the reflector without such clauses. If necessary,
send notes using a separate non-company email address, such as
hotmail.
Thank you.
Best regards,
Robert D. Love
President, LAN Connect Consultants
7105 Leveret Circle Raleigh, NC 27615
Phone: 919 848-6773 Mobile: 919
810-7816
email:
rdlove@ieee.org
Fax: 208 978-1187