IDG Contributor Network: Emails, politics and common sense

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Like many Americans, I’ve been trying to explain and justify the 2016 election cycle.

I am not an expert political scientist. I am a software engineer. The question I ask myself is: “What role did technology play in this election?” In particular, I want to focus on email.

Email is an insecure medium. Period.

I once attended an HR orientation session where we were told to write our emails in a way that wouldn’t embarrass the company if it showed up on the front page of The New York Times. The reason was that emails are inherently easy to leak. Even without someone hacking the email server, it is incredibly easy to mistype an email address or add the wrong person or the wrong group to Cc or Bcc list.

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