Copying Email Addresses: Invasion of Privacy?

You see it every day. An associate or coworker emails an entire group of folks with all their names in the To: field. In some cases these folks don’t know each other very well or only have the Sender or the topic at hand in common.

Today I received an email from a site visitor who felt her privacy had been compromised by having her name visible in the To: field of an email with others she did not know. Later that day, one of the other addresses noted in the To: field actually contacted her directly asking if she was interested in his “other” business opportunity.

Is it an invasion of privacy to email someone with out their permission by using their email address cut from an email sent to you from a mutual acquaintance? In this case, I believe it is. She didn’t ask for her address to be exposed. There was no reason for the others in the To: field to know or see her address. And because of this action she received a solicitation from someone she didn’t know about something she isn’t interested in and didn’t ask for.

The first mistake here is that the Sender should have put all their contact’s email addresses in the BCc: field rather than expose all those email addresses to strangers. By doing so they were the first to invade the privacy of their contacts by publicly displaying their email addresses to people they do not know.

Of course it would depend on what you are emailing them about and what you mean by mutual acquaintance. Even still there really would be no reason for you to contact the folks you don’t know directly by virtue of you getting the same email unless the email is an introduction for the group and encourages that contact. In that case everyone knows to expect to hear from the others involved.

The second mistake is by the other person in the To: field assuming that because those addresses were visible, that he could contact them about whatever he wanted. To contact others about ancillary, unrelated topics or worse yet commercial endeavors simply because their email address was improperly exposed to you is conducive to spamming them. Understand the issue here is you have an email address that was not provided to you by its owner and you need to govern yourself accordingly when thinking of using it.

For more info, I have an article about the E-mail Etiquette involved in using the BCc: field for your reading pleasure.

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