People make the assumption their emails are private, as for example the 20,000 DNC emails that Wikileaks recently released. The people who wrote those never expected them to circulate beyond the intended recipient.
I have difficulty understanding this "belief in electronic privacy." I begin with the assumption anything written or spoken on electronic media can become public knowledge. Not "will become" but certainly "can become" known beyond the target audience.
The sheer volume of electronic communication serves to camouflage much of what we send. And most of it is of no interest whatsoever to others. However, given the ability to search for key words, what you should assume is that anything salacious, anything that can get you in trouble with your boss, the police, a spouse, or someone else whose opinion matters to you, has a reasonable chance of winding up in their hands.
The answer is self-censorship. Don't phone or write things that can later cause you grief. Face-to-face is safer, but not 100% safe, your conversational partner could be wearing a wire, could be recording your words.
Self-censorship begins with understanding what you might write or say that could come back to bite you in a tender spot. Most human communication does not have this potential, if only because of its utter banality.
