It definitely has a good chance at being illegal. So does your grandmother clicking a link in the email if she has any hint of an idea that she&#x27;s not supposed to click that link (e.g. if the email said &quot;you are not permitted to access this link&quot; it suddenly could be illegal to intentionally visit it).<p>It&#x27;s called the &quot;Computer Fraud and Abuse Act&quot;[0].<p>The exact portion is: &quot;Whoever intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains information from any protected computer&quot; is guilty of a criminal offence.<p>This user of Gmail obviously surmised this was debug information he was not meant to see. As soon as he clicked that debug link or the detail link, he was intentionally accessing information without authorized access. He knew he was not supposed to access that information and he did so anyways.<p>The CFAA has been used before for things not too far off for this. 3Tap[1] was found guilty of CFAA abuse when it scraped Craigslist after its IPs were banned.<p>Weev[2] was prosecuted under the CFAA for accessing unprotected AT&amp;T customer data that was hidden behind a url with an incrementing integer ID (no password, no username, just a perl script to increment a url parameter in a get request).<p>This is a fairly well documented law that has been used a number of times and it&#x27;s almost certain that the author is guilty under it, as written. It&#x27;s one hell of a broad law.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Craigslist_Inc._v._3Taps_Inc</a>.<p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2013&#x2F;07&#x2F;weevs-case-flawed-beginning-end" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2013&#x2F;07&#x2F;weevs-case-flawed-begi...</a>