Expert: Dan Pepper - 12/3/2008

Question
I was told by a man that he seen my e-mails.  We live together, I have never given him my password and I have more then one e-mail address.  I don't know if he broke into my work e-mail or my personal e-mail.  Is there a way of finding out?  Is there something I can do?  Is this legal in Minnesota?  can you open other peoples e-mail without their permission?

Answer
Unfortunately this is not a black and white issue.  The crux of it comes down whether you had an expectation of privacy for your email correspondence.

Although most states recognize four branches of the invasion of privacy,  the only one relevant here is the unreasonable intrusion upon the seclusion of another.

In New Jersey, a court held that a wife’s accessing the “private” email communications of the husband did not constitute an invasion of privacy, since the husband had no objective reasonable expectation thereof. The evidence showed that the emails were accessed from a computer maintained in a sunroom that the husband had been occupying during the parties’ in-house separation; that the wife and the parties’ three children were in and out of the room for various reasons, including the use of the computer; and that, while easy to do, the husband failed to employ any privacy protection mechanisms to prevent unwarranted intrusions into his personal files. The court also found that the wife’s arguable snooping into her husband’s personal information to learn about his possible affair was not uncommon under the circumstances.

I do not know of any Minnesota cases directly on point.

Determining whether or not this man accessed your email account is not easy, and typically takes a computer forensics expert to do so.  At the end of the day, however, unless you have suffered some form of identifiable financial or mental damage as a result of these actions, it may not be worth pursuing.