Since different professions have different ethical standards in regards to confidentiality, such accidental information may be then further disseminated amongst the less-professional staff. Seeing a person walk into a mental health clinic or clinician's office - Confidentiality and privacy are very much lost when anyone can observe the public comings and goings of an individual as they make their way to or from a mental health clinic or a therapist's office. The same areas of legitimate limits to confidentiality exist online as much as they do in the real world. Best practice dictates that real-world contact information is imperative , however, to ensure an emergency situation can be properly handled. Someone replies to someone else in what they thought was private e-mail, but it actually ends up on the mailing list for all hundreds of subscribers to read.
People share computing resources all the time.
Such systems are also not usually capable of using encryption. Some professionals have rightfully noted that e-mail is not a secure medium. Compared with regular paper mail or telephone calls, there is currently no federal penalty in the U.S. for prying open someone's e-mail and reading its contents. In fact, if you receive e-mail at work, it is quite possible your employer already does this. This is a pretty outrageous claim.