Unauthorised access to students emails

[westsidestory]

I have changed my nickname. I had made a formal complaint to an higher education establishment for mature students about a member staff. The Chair did not want my complaint to go though, posed obstructions delays. Now my complaint will be before a Panel and one Director has prepared his report for this and has send it to me to comment. I discovered and was surprised the Chair had obtained unauthorised access to most of my emails with the staff. I had no idea he did so. I had not given anybody permission to access my emails and did not allow them to show them or use them. The Chair printed out my emails circulated them to other persons and these emails will be shown to the members of the Panel who will do their final verdict on my complaint.

My emails contain sensitive private information. The chair have tried to intimidate me 3 months ago into handing him over every email of mine but without success. no part of any regulations allows this. He did abuse the information in my emails. He copy pasted my phrases inside his report mocking at my profession and my lifestyle. I am not angry but feel deep pity for his state of mind. I am disabled and have dyslexia . The Chair did obviously violate the DPA. My son who is a student says he cannot believe this and he has never heard of such a ludicrous thing at any university. I plan to make a formal complaint and ask the Chair to remove my emails from their documents and not use them. Since he is a top boss I cannot complain any higher except to contact my MP. I will also contact the ICO tomorrow.

I appreciate advice.

The first thing if finis go straight to your students union and speak to an advice centre adviser. You need union support. If you have no advice centre (although most do) ask to speak to the president. The Uni won't be able to brush things under the carpet with the union's external input.

I have no idea or advice, I wonder if it is worth posting in legal as well?

Are you sure that there isn't some permission given when you sign up that emails to staff are not confidential in certain circumstances?

I'd make a guess that access to your emails would have been a condition of computer access. It is in most educational institutions.

Clearly you need to check the institutional policy, and it also depends how they got them.

Unless it is allowed in the policy, they should not have gone through your emails to get them. But if you sent them to staff members, they may have a right of access to the staff's email addresses.

If you are in England or Wales, you can take the university to the OIA if you have exhausted their complaints process.

I was a student there and not emolyee. I plan to do go to OIA after the procedure finishes. There was nothing in my emails they could get or prove but they wanted to just harass me because I complained. People pick on your lifestyle mainly. The next serve will be mine after the internal process ends. In large universities the student is asked permission.

Check your university's policies, because as far as I understand it, the university, and its officers, can have access to emails sent via its system. I'm aware of is as a university employee. My emails are not private, and can be requested under FoI terms.

Thank you UptheChimney
I will make a FOI request to the Institute to find how the obtained access to the emails. I used my private account like gmail to send emails to the university. These were accessed. Also the emails from the uni to my private account were accessed. I did not have a uni account.
The accessed emails do not provide proof for any purpose. The Chair wanted to find my lifestyle but emails even when they are legitimately accessed should be used in a responsible manner. I also get very useful attention in the Legal

All Universities can access what they like on your University account. Its part of their security monitoring, and their responsibility to keep racist/sexist/violent stuff off campus.

Universities are very powerful institutions. Be very careful before you take one on in any legal/confrontational way.

Your emails to the Uni entered the Uni server so of course they can 'access' them, and if emails were sent from a Uni account in reply of course they can access them. Their server, their right to do what they like with them. They can also trawl the Net, look at Facebook and find any other sites you leave stuff on. So could I if I knew enough about you. Welcome to the Internet.

Also the emails from the uni to my private account were accessed. I did not have a uni account

That's probably quite legal, if they were made by a university employee. The University can access my emails made from my university email account, or indeed, any use I make of my university's internet connections.

So I think you might be wasting your energy in a complaint about that.

What Mrs Bright says.

Be careful how you expend emotional energy & time on this. Work out what resolution you want. It will rarely be a "moral" " lesson learned" resolution in the sense of a fairy tale ending where the evil get their just desserts.

Think about what you really want out of this process, and whether you are likely to get it.

UptheChimney Thanks. At present I have achieved that a small part of my complaint was upheld due to compelling evidence. Of course I feel stressed for a good reason: Institutions must have procedures and rules that are comparable to those in other peer establishments but this is not the case always. The competition should be fair.

I had advice: the emails are property of the university and they can access them, however under certain rules of data sharing. The advice is that if I am unhappy the way emails are used and if they fall outside my expectations I should complain. ICO has some advice on its website. I was advised to raise this matter as a separate complaint.

At my last institution, email to/from staff was automatically copied to secretaries. This was done so that when people were travelling emails could be responded to without delays. It may therefore be possible that any email between you and a member of staff was also received by a member of the secretarial team.

MagratGarlik of course I do not object that everything is copied to the relevant staff and when I sent emails I copied my query to those relevant there, it needs to be so. This is a separate issue. I was talking that the statutory code of practice regulates how emails are allowed to be used even if obtained legally. It is like a thing that one buys from store but how you use this is another matter and another is the effect they might have on other individuals.

Westsidestory, I didn't mean that mails were visibility copied to secretaries, I mean secretaries were by default sent copies of all email to staff - this was set up on the system, so if you emailed Prof X, you would not be aware that his/her secretary was also going to be sent a copy of that email too. Therefore, even if you have not copied certain staff into emails they may still have copies of them, depending on who else the system is set up to send the mail to. (Hope that makes sense).