In a networked environment, privacy is relative rather than absolute. It is prudent to refrain from using email for confidential, potentially damaging or embarrassing information. Any email message may become public. An email message should be considered as private as a postcard. Users bear the primary responsibility for the security of their data.
Confidentiality is compromised most often by carelessness rather than unscrupulous hacking.
Users with important or confidential data on their PC's should use screensaver passwords, should thoroughly understand the access privileges on their network data storage, and should exercise great care with sensitive printouts of the data when the printers are publicly accessible. Computer data inevitably becomes unavailable from time to time either because of user or software errors, or because of disk drive hardware failure. When that happens, IS will restore data from a recent backup. Virtually all such warnings are hoaxes. A good discussion of virus hoaxes can be found here .