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It's nice to hear about the server-side PGP support (searching!), although it's unfortunate that the client-side solution, Mailvelope (or more specifically, the

• mikekchar 10y ago
  I may be wrong (and hope to be corrected!), but I think that End-to-End is never expected to be in the Chrome Web Store. I think they feel that this kind of encryption is too complicated for the average user. It's intended more for "power users" who already know that they want it.
  • SquareWheel 10y ago
    They've discouraged people from compiling builds and then uploading it to the store, but I believe this is because they don't want a half-implemented/untested PGP library posted -- especially one with their name on it. I haven't seen any concrete plans about how they plan to distribute it when it's done, but I didn't get the same sense about them not wanting to upload it themselves. In fact, I think Google would be thrilled to push proper end-to-end support in Gmail.
    • riprowan 10y ago
      Sorry if this is a dumb question, but if Gmail is e2e, how can Google harvest user data from it?
      • SquareWheel 10y ago
        They couldn't. They would have to show ads from other history and not the email's contents. This would also break features such as (server-side) search and reminders (eg. flight tomorrow) via Google Now. End-to-end is a tradeoff. But presumably they wouldn't be working on the technology if they weren't prepared to offer it in some fashion. Probably as an opt-in? Hopefully a Googler can offer more insight as I can only speculate.
        • ryanl0l 10y ago
          >They couldn't. They would have to show ads from other history and not the email's contents. This would also break features such as (server-side) search and reminders (eg. flight tomorrow) via Google Now. Sure they could, all incoming emails aren't magically going to become e2e encrypted.
          • SquareWheel 10y ago
            Well, no. But that's not really end-to-end, is it? If the goal is to make E2E more accessible then eventually more emails will come in encrypted. Maybe Google will let users with the extension find each other, or Gmail might help coordinate that.
            • ryanl0l 10y ago
              Sure, but I'd imagine that most email traffic is automated non-sensitive stuff (i.e. flight confirmations for example). That stuff is simply not going to be e2e encrypted any time soon, if ever. Are people going to start filling in their pubkeys when they book a flight? What about when they're at the airport and need to pull up the record locator on a different device? I'm sure more emails will start being encrypted, but that'll mostly be communications between people. Those probably aren't particularly interesting to google anyway.
              • SquareWheel 10y ago
                I'd give it time. People won't enter their public keys when booking a flight, but it might be associated with their email address automatically. I could see Google running a service like Keybase. Or even integrating it further into whatever the next hip "online identity" service is. Built in privacy would be a huge boon. The flight company (or email sender they use) could then request your public key and send off your message. And with some common protocols and APIs the complexity could be largely abstracted away. I wouldn't underestimate the technology. When you look at more complex systems like internet routing tables, these problems feel a lot more solvable. We already have the technology for most of this. The problem right now is making it accessible.
      • superuser2 10y ago
        Probably most messages through GMail would still not be E2E.
  • Sephr 10y ago
    They indicate in the GitHub repo that this should eventually be ready for the Chrome Web Store, so they definitely plan on distributing it there eventually. Worst case, it reaches a more or less "finished" state and Google doesn't upload it to the CWS—anyone else can still upload it since it's Apache licensed. I doubt it will ever come to that though.