Allen’s personal comments

Email Privacy

Most of the Ashland University privacy policy is available online (Google “Ashland University Privacy Policy”) and is concerned with the way the university collects and manages personal information about you (your address, grades, and so forth).

There’s more to the privacy question: the way you deal with email you send. The material below is my advice, not Ashland official policy, but I think you would be wise to consider it and deal carefully with the email you send and receive.

• The @ashland.edu email address is administered by the university. This means that it is not your personal private playground, and you should not use it to send messages which are threatening, illegal, or lewd. (It’s actually a very poor idea to send such messages in any form from any email address.)
• If you are tempted to send information about a third person, ask yourself whether it would be appropriate to post such information on a campus bulletin board or print it on the front page of the newspaper. If it doesn’t pass this test, don’t send it. (Thus, “John Doe caught a great touchdown pass” would probably be OK, but “Here is John Doe’s private phone number” is questionable and “Here is an unknown dark secret from John Doe’s past” certainly does not pass the test.)
• You have no control over who sees email, so a lot of information—whether yours or someone else’s—should never be sent: credit card numbers, passwords, website challenge answers (“Brand of your first car”), and so forth. The general idea is that if information could cause harm in the wrong hands, don’t send it.
• By law, a lot of student information is private, including grades. This is why most instructors are very reluctant to send grade information by email, especially if it is the grade for the course as a whole.

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.

The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by Ashland University.

Revised 6/3/24 • Page author: Curtis Allen • e-mail: callen@ashland.edu.