This is of course not a joke in some countries, and has been done with success. I am very good friends with someone who grew up in one of the central asian dictatorships (stan), and their family had one of the (few) internet lines in the country. One day his family lost an important email, so they walked to the intelligence office, told them the date, and the officials were happy to retrieve it for them from the file drawer. They had been printing out and physically filing every piece of correspondence from each internet user (somewhat doable for the regime given only a small subset of the population). The point is, in this stan, there was no pretense of privacy. They were your helpful backup service.