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I have a hard time to see any use case where no security is different from giving google a plain text copy of a private conversations where google has the right

by belorn 7y ago

I have a hard time to see any use case where no security is different from giving google a plain text copy of a private conversations where google has the right to determine who and how others might participate in accessing it. Giving google a plain text copy of everything you say in private communication is not good enough security. Anyone working with information that is covered under privacy laws should be held legal responsible for disclosing it to a third party, regardless if that third party is google or a friend at a bar. If it is a doctor, lawyer or government employee the probability of this is close to 100%. If its a company talking to customers, communicating personal data as defined by the EU between employees, there is only a google breach away from being found out and sued. The only choice is encryption, with the choice between a encrypted server under the control of the person responsible for keeping the information safe, or encryption per email. Which of those two choices one choose does not matter but giving google a plain text copy and calling it safe is just LARP security. I should mention that here in Sweden there were recently a large political scandal involving the government using IBM as a third party service provider. Sensitive data got sent over the border and outside the control of the government, and it continued for years as those in charged really wanted to believe that "the cloud" could treated as just as secure as running your own servers. The law said otherwise, and when reality came crashing down things had to change. Convenience does not make it suddenly acceptable to give a third party sensitive information, even if that third party is a large international operator who can't do any wrongs.

joshuamorton 7y ago
Privacy is not security. Privacy laws do not improve your security. PGP does almost nothing to improve your privacy even when used correctly (metadata leaks). I have a hard time understanding what your point is. If Google, or whomever, is following the relevant privacy laws, why do you care if they have a plaintext copy of your private communications?
- belorn 7y ago
  I am talking about the threat model that a person have if they work with information that by law they need to keep secret, which if you live in the EU is basically any personal identifiable information about a customers. There is also a long list of professions that deal with sensitive information and carry legal binding requirements to not divulge to third parties. Typical examples is anyone working in health care, education, government, legal system and so on. I am not talking about meta data but classified or data which if disclosed results in people getting fired and holds legal punishment such as jail time. Using gmail without encryption in those cases is a security issue and also illegal. A lot of people still use gmail in those cases and google track record in regard to data leaks has meant that few people have been found out. That said it will only take one significant data leak and people will start to dig for all data being sent to google. That day a lot of peoples head will roll. I would guess without exaggeration that a large enough data leak at gmail would cause a global market crash. There is just too much plain text data containing sensitive information that people would dig into. Not private, not meta, just information which people should not have given to a third party. Google privacy policy does not play a role in that.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    > I am talking about the threat model that a person have if they work with information that by law they need to keep secret Then PGP is irrelevant, you don't email that data around. And even if you are, then you aren't dealing with security, you're dealing with compliance, compliance with legal obligations has nothing to do with, and is often in direct action against, actual security. > Using gmail without encryption in those cases is a security issue and illegal. This, almost certainly, isn't true, given that Gmail is a GDPR compliant store. You might need to use enterprise gmail, for the legal requirements, but that's still entirely beside the point. "Use enterprise Gmail" is the solution here, not "fail to use PGP".
    - belorn 7y ago
      It is true that people should not email that kind of data but then we assume good op security. Failure of op security is one of the argument of the author here against encryption. On that note I agree with him. People op security is bad, thus they should not use a third party service provider where the line between legal and illegal is the wrong attachment. Enterprise Gmail is able to operate as a data processor, but there is a lot of fine details in order to stay within the law. It assumes that the company has agreed to the gmail processing terms and gotten permission from their own customer to process the data in such ways. Again here we hope that op security match the fine line between legal and illegal. (If we want a practical example which I know people do, imagine a administrator of a CRM sending a copy of the database to a new hosting provider. Now a copy of the database exist in the sent folder and an other copy at the email provider that the hosting company use. It is very doubtful that GDPR allows that kind of sharing of the private information. If the file get leaked in a data breach there is high probability of a successful lawsuit for mishandling of the information). Using your own email server or tools that automatically encrypt everything does however prevent those risks.
      - joshuamorton 7y ago
        What email server do you use that automatically end to end encrypts everything using pgp? It sounds like you're talking about encryption at rest, in which case Gmail does that already, more securely than whatever you're doing so the backwards approach to compliance is more effort and less secure in practice.

by belorn 7y ago

joshuamorton 7y ago

Privacy is not security. Privacy laws do not improve your security. PGP does almost nothing to improve your privacy even when used correctly (metadata leaks). I have a hard time understanding what your point is. If Google, or whomever, is following the relevant privacy laws, why do you care if they have a plaintext copy of your private communications?

belorn 7y ago
I am talking about the threat model that a person have if they work with information that by law they need to keep secret, which if you live in the EU is basically any personal identifiable information about a customers. There is also a long list of professions that deal with sensitive information and carry legal binding requirements to not divulge to third parties. Typical examples is anyone working in health care, education, government, legal system and so on. I am not talking about meta data but classified or data which if disclosed results in people getting fired and holds legal punishment such as jail time. Using gmail without encryption in those cases is a security issue and also illegal. A lot of people still use gmail in those cases and google track record in regard to data leaks has meant that few people have been found out. That said it will only take one significant data leak and people will start to dig for all data being sent to google. That day a lot of peoples head will roll. I would guess without exaggeration that a large enough data leak at gmail would cause a global market crash. There is just too much plain text data containing sensitive information that people would dig into. Not private, not meta, just information which people should not have given to a third party. Google privacy policy does not play a role in that.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  > I am talking about the threat model that a person have if they work with information that by law they need to keep secret Then PGP is irrelevant, you don't email that data around. And even if you are, then you aren't dealing with security, you're dealing with compliance, compliance with legal obligations has nothing to do with, and is often in direct action against, actual security. > Using gmail without encryption in those cases is a security issue and illegal. This, almost certainly, isn't true, given that Gmail is a GDPR compliant store. You might need to use enterprise gmail, for the legal requirements, but that's still entirely beside the point. "Use enterprise Gmail" is the solution here, not "fail to use PGP".
  - belorn 7y ago
    It is true that people should not email that kind of data but then we assume good op security. Failure of op security is one of the argument of the author here against encryption. On that note I agree with him. People op security is bad, thus they should not use a third party service provider where the line between legal and illegal is the wrong attachment. Enterprise Gmail is able to operate as a data processor, but there is a lot of fine details in order to stay within the law. It assumes that the company has agreed to the gmail processing terms and gotten permission from their own customer to process the data in such ways. Again here we hope that op security match the fine line between legal and illegal. (If we want a practical example which I know people do, imagine a administrator of a CRM sending a copy of the database to a new hosting provider. Now a copy of the database exist in the sent folder and an other copy at the email provider that the hosting company use. It is very doubtful that GDPR allows that kind of sharing of the private information. If the file get leaked in a data breach there is high probability of a successful lawsuit for mishandling of the information). Using your own email server or tools that automatically encrypt everything does however prevent those risks.
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      What email server do you use that automatically end to end encrypts everything using pgp? It sounds like you're talking about encryption at rest, in which case Gmail does that already, more securely than whatever you're doing so the backwards approach to compliance is more effort and less secure in practice.