Although libel law and the law governing indecent material are not discussed here, sysops should note that regular review of private user messages may increase their risk under those laws. Arguments supporting a user's claim of privacy can be based on a constitution or a statute. However, the existence of constitutional privacy rights is often doubtful. Incidentally, the jurisdiction that provides the strongest constitutional protection for personal digital data may well be Germany. Since 1983, all Germans have had a constitutional right to know what data is being kept on them and by whom.
German citizens are also guaranteed access to the data to ensure that it is correct.
U.S. companies doing business in Germany are bound by these rules. In the U.S., some statutes reduce sysop risk by implicitly preventing suits by competitors or by users whose access was terminated. Many privacy rights recognized by federal and state statutes only have criminal penalties, so suits alleging violation can be brought only by prosecutors, not by businesses or private citizens. Thus, someone alleging a privacy violation may need to establish that the intent behind a particular law makes the law applicable to sysops even though terms such as 'electronic mail' or 'digital information' are not used by that law. As a practical matter, this gives sysops the right to review any message because the system can be configured to store every message for at least a limited time.