Can campaigns read instant messages and emails if you discuss the candidate?
Posted on February 5th, 2010 by admin
I know that there is a program or whatever that allows campaigns to know of people using a search engine to find info about their candidate, but does this extend to IMs and emails? I don’t know what this program (or whatever) is called either, anyone know that too?
There are no programs that can just search all the email and IM streams occurring on the internet. Search engines and websites allow that because you actively visit those sites, so they can monitor you. IM could do that if they put monitoring software on the IM server, but it’s doubtful that any has been installed.
Email is a "fire and forget" kind of thing. The email hops from mail server to mail server until it reaches its destination. There could be monitoring done at any of those mail servers, but there are thousands if not millions of those. There is no guarantee what path your email will take. Thus no easy way to monitor everything in email.
If someone wants to monitor your email, they need to be sure that they put their monitor on the first hop from you in order to ensure being able to collect.
February 5th, 2010 at 5:52 am
Due to the technical limitations & other issues I don’t think it’s possible for such a program to exist. Since the peer to peer nature of most of IM protocols it’s very hard [virtually impossible] to track such amount of data in real time.
References :
February 5th, 2010 at 6:13 am
There are no programs that can just search all the email and IM streams occurring on the internet. Search engines and websites allow that because you actively visit those sites, so they can monitor you. IM could do that if they put monitoring software on the IM server, but it’s doubtful that any has been installed.
Email is a "fire and forget" kind of thing. The email hops from mail server to mail server until it reaches its destination. There could be monitoring done at any of those mail servers, but there are thousands if not millions of those. There is no guarantee what path your email will take. Thus no easy way to monitor everything in email.
If someone wants to monitor your email, they need to be sure that they put their monitor on the first hop from you in order to ensure being able to collect.
References :