privacy gdpr email social-media identification
Is it legal to post an email to social media if the email also contains a photo of the sender and other personal identifiable information?
<p>I've seen a few similar questions asked before, however would posting a screenshot of an email onto social media be legal under the following circumstances:</p>
<ul>
<li>The poster on social media is the recipient of such email</li>
<li>The recipient uses Gmail, which ties the email address of the Sender to the a LinkedIn profile if they have one, displaying it to the right of the email and including the Name of the Sender, Photo of the Sender, and current job of the Sender, which were otherwise not stated in the email.</li>
<li>The screenshot of the email includes all of this information: it displays not only the sender's email address and the original email, but also the information of the Sender's LinkedIn account (name, current job, photo) that the recipient's Gmail account linked to</li>
</ul>
<p>I'm curious to see how others would interpret these facts. The question here is not so much the content of the email but rather the inclusion of the other identifiable information (Name, email address, photo, current job)</p>

<h2>Copyright</h2>
<p>The first legal impediment is that you don’t own the copyright in the email so copying it without permission is <em>prima facie</em> copyright violation.</p>
<p>You may have a fair use defence but that is not clear. You don’t have a fair dealing defence. You may be able to argue that you have an implicit licence to make copies of correspondence but I doubt that would extend to posting it on social media.</p>
<h2>Privacy</h2>
<p>Basically unanswerable without a lot more detail about who an where the sender and receiver are.</p>
<p>Are they in Europe? The USA? Australia? Brazil? Different jurisdictions have different laws.</p>
<p>Are they acting in a private capacity or a business one? If a business, is it their business or are they an employee? How large is the business?</p>
<h2>Confidentiality</h2>
<p>In many civil law jurisdictions, communications are private and cannot be disclosed without the permission of the sender and the recipient.</p>
<p>In common law jurisdictions this is not the case but there are circumstances where the recipient owes a duty of confidentiality to the sender (e.g. a lawyer receiving legal info, a doctor receiving health info etc.) and disclosure can be a tort and/or a breach of professional ethics.</p>
