5 ms·

Locks down your Gmail from everyone except the companies that pay Google for the information gleaned from AI reading your emails.

edraferi 9y ago
Which is the well-understood cost of getting an otherwise free, highly performant, unusually secure service for free.
- javajosh 9y ago
  Without saying whether it is a good trade, we can at least surely say that it is NOT "well-understood" by users, since the vast majority are not aware of making this trade at all.
- tonyztan 9y ago
  I've always wondered why they don't offer the option for personal (gmail.com) users to pay for the service and opt out of monetization. I'd pay $5-10 per month for Google's services without me being the product.
  - ozmodiar 9y ago
    At that price you could just get a Google Suite email. Of course at a quick glance it just says no advertisements, I'm not sure that they wont be monetizing your data some other way.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > I'd pay $5-10 per month for Google's services without me being the product. That's actually not much different than paying for a domain and G Suite Basic. Which is probably what they expect people that concerned will do.
    - tonyztan 9y ago
      That's a good point. But currently there is no option to use my gmail.com address with G Suite, which I'd like to keep because of old accounts. I host my domain name email addresses with ProtonMail.
- pdonis 9y ago
  > the well-understood cost Cost, yes. Well understood? Not by the vast majority of the few billion Google users, who think it's perfectly normal for Google's service to just magically appear on the Internet without them having to fork over any cash.
- ryanlol 9y ago
  Unusually secure? Wasn't Gmail among the first in pushing super insecure SMS password resets, which are still resulting in high profile account hijackings every single day?
parent5446 9y ago
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-23/google-will-stop-reading-your-emails-for-gmail-ads https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-23/google-wi...
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  That pledge ... seems to possibly be getting rolled back: ...However, court documents suggest that this could be temporary. A month after Google's announcement, the company quietly agreed (PDF) to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that the targeted-advertising scanning was illegal wiretapping. That deal, in which a federal judge gave "preliminarily approval" (PDF) to on Thursday, binds Google for just three years.... https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/google-promised-not-to-scan-gmail-for-targeted-ads-but-for-how-long/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/google-promised-...
dredmorbius 9y ago
There are several holes still available. Google claim, with some credibility, not to offer up personal information via email. Instead, ads are placed, but user identification is not provided. (The extent to which this information can be de-anonymised is something I'd like to see.) But the data remain, on Google's servers, encrypted to keys Google itself has, and susceptible to exfiltration by various account attacks. The problems of the Podesta attack mentioned in the article are several. Google are addressing part, but not all, of that attack. 1. Podesta was sent a phishing message that was not detected and blocked entirely. 2. His multi-member email management team failed to appropriately respond to that message. This isn't a case of Podesta alone falling for this, he had help. 3. His password was obtained. 4. The password, and it alone, was sufficient to access Podesta's account. 5. Unusual access patterns were not detected and blocked by Google. (Google are actually fairly good at doing this -- to the extent I've been repeatedly locked out of accounts.) 6. Given account access, substantially all of Podesta's email was successfully copied to the attacker's systems. 7. That email was immediately readable to the attackers, as it was not encrypted to keys Podesta alone controlled (and independent of his already-compromised password). That's seven points of failure, any one of which could have prevented the attack.
- dpark 9y ago
  > 7. That email was immediately readable to the attackers, as it was not encrypted to keys Podesta alone controlled (and independent of his already-compromised password). So it’s a flaw that you can access your email when you’re authenticated successfully?
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Yes. There should be a second-stage, preferably device-only, decryption phase. That is, the entire concept of "identity" is confounded out of a cluster of often only loosely-related concepts. Among them: 1. Who are you? 2. Should I trust you? 3. Did you do X? 4. Is X as you left it? 5. Can you (and ideally you alone) read X? 6. Should I allow you to do X? 7. Do I owe you / you owe me X? 8. Must I pay you (or seek permission) to use/do X? 9. Are you the same X as some other X' (in another place, time, system, ...)? Accessing the email store (authentication) is not the same as being able to read email (decryption), or being able to say you sent a specific message and that it hasn't been changed (integrity). Electronic / digital data formats violate many of the trust bases that have formed around material or personal data transfers. Paper, stamps, seals, institutional trust (that, say, the post office isn't opening, reading, and/or censoring mails), etc. It's an entirely different set of physics, if you will. The rules have changed. Google are playing by the old rules. They are losing, and so are we.

edraferi 9y ago

Which is the well-understood cost of getting an otherwise free, highly performant, unusually secure service for free.

javajosh 9y ago
Without saying whether it is a good trade, we can at least surely say that it is NOT "well-understood" by users, since the vast majority are not aware of making this trade at all.
tonyztan 9y ago
I've always wondered why they don't offer the option for personal (gmail.com) users to pay for the service and opt out of monetization. I'd pay $5-10 per month for Google's services without me being the product.
- ozmodiar 9y ago
  At that price you could just get a Google Suite email. Of course at a quick glance it just says no advertisements, I'm not sure that they wont be monetizing your data some other way.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > I'd pay $5-10 per month for Google's services without me being the product. That's actually not much different than paying for a domain and G Suite Basic. Which is probably what they expect people that concerned will do.
  - tonyztan 9y ago
    That's a good point. But currently there is no option to use my gmail.com address with G Suite, which I'd like to keep because of old accounts. I host my domain name email addresses with ProtonMail.
pdonis 9y ago
> the well-understood cost Cost, yes. Well understood? Not by the vast majority of the few billion Google users, who think it's perfectly normal for Google's service to just magically appear on the Internet without them having to fork over any cash.
ryanlol 9y ago
Unusually secure? Wasn't Gmail among the first in pushing super insecure SMS password resets, which are still resulting in high profile account hijackings every single day?

parent5446 9y ago

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-23/google-will-stop-reading-your-emails-for-gmail-ads https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-23/google-wi...

dredmorbius 9y ago
That pledge ... seems to possibly be getting rolled back: ...However, court documents suggest that this could be temporary. A month after Google's announcement, the company quietly agreed (PDF) to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that the targeted-advertising scanning was illegal wiretapping. That deal, in which a federal judge gave "preliminarily approval" (PDF) to on Thursday, binds Google for just three years.... https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/google-promised-not-to-scan-gmail-for-targeted-ads-but-for-how-long/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/google-promised-...

dredmorbius 9y ago

There are several holes still available. Google claim, with some credibility, not to offer up personal information via email. Instead, ads are placed, but user identification is not provided. (The extent to which this information can be de-anonymised is something I'd like to see.) But the data remain, on Google's servers, encrypted to keys Google itself has, and susceptible to exfiltration by various account attacks. The problems of the Podesta attack mentioned in the article are several. Google are addressing part, but not all, of that attack. 1. Podesta was sent a phishing message that was not detected and blocked entirely. 2. His multi-member email management team failed to appropriately respond to that message. This isn't a case of Podesta alone falling for this, he had help. 3. His password was obtained. 4. The password, and it alone, was sufficient to access Podesta's account. 5. Unusual access patterns were not detected and blocked by Google. (Google are actually fairly good at doing this -- to the extent I've been repeatedly locked out of accounts.) 6. Given account access, substantially all of Podesta's email was successfully copied to the attacker's systems. 7. That email was immediately readable to the attackers, as it was not encrypted to keys Podesta alone controlled (and independent of his already-compromised password). That's seven points of failure, any one of which could have prevented the attack.

dpark 9y ago
> 7. That email was immediately readable to the attackers, as it was not encrypted to keys Podesta alone controlled (and independent of his already-compromised password). So it’s a flaw that you can access your email when you’re authenticated successfully?
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Yes. There should be a second-stage, preferably device-only, decryption phase. That is, the entire concept of "identity" is confounded out of a cluster of often only loosely-related concepts. Among them: 1. Who are you? 2. Should I trust you? 3. Did you do X? 4. Is X as you left it? 5. Can you (and ideally you alone) read X? 6. Should I allow you to do X? 7. Do I owe you / you owe me X? 8. Must I pay you (or seek permission) to use/do X? 9. Are you the same X as some other X' (in another place, time, system, ...)? Accessing the email store (authentication) is not the same as being able to read email (decryption), or being able to say you sent a specific message and that it hasn't been changed (integrity). Electronic / digital data formats violate many of the trust bases that have formed around material or personal data transfers. Paper, stamps, seals, institutional trust (that, say, the post office isn't opening, reading, and/or censoring mails), etc. It's an entirely different set of physics, if you will. The rules have changed. Google are playing by the old rules. They are losing, and so are we.