Ownership, Privacy and Security Questions

• Is your email yours or the universityfs? Other files on your computer?

• Who owns your email? (Ownership vs. intellectual property issues)

• Who has the ability to read your email without your permission? Your electronic files?

• Do you distinguish between gofficialh and personal email? Do you manage and store them differently?

• UNC ONLY: Have you heard of the Public Records Law in North Carolina? Are you aware that the University can make portions of our email available to the public under that law? DUKE ONLY: Do you think that the University can make portions of your email available to the public under certain legal conditions?

How individuals view the ownership of their emails and other electronic files will influence the decisions they make on how to handle the files. So, we needed to ask the following questions:

• [click] Is your email yours or the university's? How about the other files on your computer?

• [click] Who owns your email? i.e., if you create a document or email message, is it your intellectual property?

• [click] Who has the ability to read your email without your permission? How about your electronic files?

• [click] Do you distinguish between "official" and personal email? Do you manage and store them differently?

• [click] And then finally we needed to know whether or not individuals were aware of the NC Public Records Law and how it pertained to the files they were creating or receiving in the course of doing business at the university – and at Duke, we wanted to know if individuals were aware that under certain legal conditions, i.e., discovery in a lawsuit, their email and other electronic files were discoverable.