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Email is indeed woefully insecure, but the problem with Google's "privacy" policy has little to do with whether or not email is a secure medium or not. It's abo

Email is indeed woefully insecure, but the problem with Google's "privacy" policy has little to do with whether or not email is a secure medium or not. It's about social norms, and Google's institutional ignorance of them. Privacy is created by social norms. It's no technical challenge for me to borrow your paper mail from your mailbox, steam it open, read it, copy the bits I find interesting, seal it up again, and replace it in your mailbox. But, in doing so, it's understood that I'm doing an awful thing. It's so awful that it's against the law: http://www.wbrz.com/news/postal-workers-accused-of-tampering-with-mail http://www.wbrz.com/news/postal-workers-accused-of-tampering... ... and, all else being equal, juries will not be inclined to sympathize with me. Similarly, it's somewhere between very rude and illegal, depending on circumstances, to intercept or interfere with someone's email. If you happen to glance at someone's email you're expected to keep politely silent about it, as you would be if you happened to glimpse your neighbor through a window of their house. You're certainly expected, under pain of felony charges, not to tamper with or forge someone's email, just as you're expected to avoid entering your neighbor's house without knocking even if the front door is standing open. Google, on the other hand, seems to be constantly trying to establish the precedent that it's perfectly normal and polite for any aspect of your life - currently including, but presumably not forever limited to: the state of your front yard, the contents of your photo album, the list of movies you've watched on YouTube, and the contents of your mailbox - to be sampled, data-mined, correlated, and archived forever by entities completely outside your knowledge or control so long as those entities are using secret algorithms to do it. If you'd tolerate this behavior in a friend, you may by all means continue to have Google as a friend. I, however, am getting increasingly uncomfortable with Google sitting in my living room, and am increasingly tempted to escort them politely but firmly to the door and then deliberately misplace their address.

jaylevitt 15y ago
I'm curious: Gmail, since the very beginning, has been predicated on the idea that Google will serve you relevant, content-related ads. (I thought that was a non-starter, but the world proved me wrong.) How long did you use them, and what finally triggered you to say "No, this is not OK"?
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  I've never used Gmail for personal mail. I talked myself into using Gmail as the IMAP server for my business for a while, but then migrated that to Fastmail. My company uses Gmail and Google Docs, extensively. It's been fun using Gmail, at least before they "updated" the interface. (The new interface has not been my friend, thus far.) I can definitely understand why everyone fell in love with Gmail when it was new. Giving up Gmail is easy; there are many alternatives. Even Google Search has alternatives. A bigger frustration is Google Reader, which is harder to replace. And I can't give up Docs or Groups cold-turkey, because I belong to groups that use them; fortunately I haven't used them for anything especially private.
mangodrunk 15y ago
How would we deal with spam? Anyways, it's part of their policy and you don't have to use it. Also, you may not understand how these sorts of things work, but most other services will keep such things, that's one of the benefits of the Internet. I don't get you conspiracy theorists on HN. Down voting doesn't make an argument.
baddox 15y ago
You're right that privacy is all about social norms and expectations. That's why I've never understood how people willingly sharing personal information is considered a privacy issue at all. If I show my friend a postcard sent to me by another friend, no one's privacy has been violated. If I trust a roommate (e.g. a significant other) to read my mail, there's no privacy issue there. This applies to a huge portion of privacy concerns raised by the tech community. Someone sharing their photos, location, or thoughts willingly on Facebook does not constitute a privacy issue. Someone accepting a fairly clear Google privacy policy and thereby letting their algorithm read all their emails does not constitute a privacy issue. The real privacy issues are ones where companies don't follow their own privacy policies, or companies' databases get compromised, or companies abruptly change default sharing settings to be more public (which, granted, I believe Facebook has done before).
- sofifonfek 15y ago
  AFAIK google has broken its own privacy policy, gmail's databases have been compromised and they did change default settings to be more public at least once. This makes a strong contender of gmail for privacy issues.
- batista 15y ago
  That's why I've never understood how people willingly sharing personal information is considered a privacy issue at all. If I show my friend a postcard sent to me by another friend, no one's privacy has been violated. Really? Because most people would consider that it HAS been violated. Opting to share something with some person X is not the same as opting to have it shared by X to anyone else, except if you explicitly or implicitly permit him to. If your gf sends you an intimate mail, I don't think she will not feel her privacy was violated if you show it to your pals.
  - baddox 15y ago
    > except if you explicitly or implicitly permit him to. What was precisely my point. > If your gf sends you an intimate mail, I don't think she will not feel her privacy was violated if you show it to your pals. Depending on the message and your relationship, one might be able to argue that there is an explicit or implicit contract of confidentiality between partners.
cageface 15y ago
The problem with dumping gmail for another email provider is that at least half of the people with whom I correspond use gmail too so my messages wind up on their servers anyway. Edit: REALLY tired of all the idiotic downvoting lately. What I've said is factual. Don't be such a lazy fuck and post a rebuttal if you disagree.
- sofifonfek 15y ago
  Here's your rebuttal: shine another light on your situation and suddenly instead of having half the messages ending up on google servers anyways, you have half of your email freed from google servers which is better than having all on it there, privacywise.
  - cageface 15y ago
    I imagine about 20% of my email correspondence is all it would take for Google to form a pretty accurate picture of my interests and habits and circles of acquaintance. That's the way machine learning usually works: you don't need a complete dataset to make useful inferences.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  Sure, but the difference is in the implied consent. If I continue to use Gmail beyond another week or two (what's that deadline, again?) I've implicitly consented to Google's policy on what they're permitted to do with my email. (One nice thing about Google: I can't really claim they haven't told me about this nonsense. They are taking the notification of their customers very seriously.) If, however, I'm not actually a Google user, but the Googlers secretly reassemble my mailboxes by sniffing the inboxes and outboxes of all of my friends and relations... well, that's a bigger transgression. They didn't ask my permission to do that, and when they asked my permission to do similar things I said no. So they'd better be good at keeping their activities secret, because if I ever learn that they did it I'll squawk a long, loud squawk. Sure, social disapproval doesn't have the force of law. (At least, not right away.) But it does have force.
  - 15y ago

jaylevitt 15y ago

I'm curious: Gmail, since the very beginning, has been predicated on the idea that Google will serve you relevant, content-related ads. (I thought that was a non-starter, but the world proved me wrong.) How long did you use them, and what finally triggered you to say "No, this is not OK"?

mechanical_fish 15y ago
I've never used Gmail for personal mail. I talked myself into using Gmail as the IMAP server for my business for a while, but then migrated that to Fastmail. My company uses Gmail and Google Docs, extensively. It's been fun using Gmail, at least before they "updated" the interface. (The new interface has not been my friend, thus far.) I can definitely understand why everyone fell in love with Gmail when it was new. Giving up Gmail is easy; there are many alternatives. Even Google Search has alternatives. A bigger frustration is Google Reader, which is harder to replace. And I can't give up Docs or Groups cold-turkey, because I belong to groups that use them; fortunately I haven't used them for anything especially private.

mangodrunk 15y ago

How would we deal with spam? Anyways, it's part of their policy and you don't have to use it. Also, you may not understand how these sorts of things work, but most other services will keep such things, that's one of the benefits of the Internet. I don't get you conspiracy theorists on HN. Down voting doesn't make an argument.

baddox 15y ago

You're right that privacy is all about social norms and expectations. That's why I've never understood how people willingly sharing personal information is considered a privacy issue at all. If I show my friend a postcard sent to me by another friend, no one's privacy has been violated. If I trust a roommate (e.g. a significant other) to read my mail, there's no privacy issue there. This applies to a huge portion of privacy concerns raised by the tech community. Someone sharing their photos, location, or thoughts willingly on Facebook does not constitute a privacy issue. Someone accepting a fairly clear Google privacy policy and thereby letting their algorithm read all their emails does not constitute a privacy issue. The real privacy issues are ones where companies don't follow their own privacy policies, or companies' databases get compromised, or companies abruptly change default sharing settings to be more public (which, granted, I believe Facebook has done before).

sofifonfek 15y ago
AFAIK google has broken its own privacy policy, gmail's databases have been compromised and they did change default settings to be more public at least once. This makes a strong contender of gmail for privacy issues.
batista 15y ago
That's why I've never understood how people willingly sharing personal information is considered a privacy issue at all. If I show my friend a postcard sent to me by another friend, no one's privacy has been violated. Really? Because most people would consider that it HAS been violated. Opting to share something with some person X is not the same as opting to have it shared by X to anyone else, except if you explicitly or implicitly permit him to. If your gf sends you an intimate mail, I don't think she will not feel her privacy was violated if you show it to your pals.
- baddox 15y ago
  > except if you explicitly or implicitly permit him to. What was precisely my point. > If your gf sends you an intimate mail, I don't think she will not feel her privacy was violated if you show it to your pals. Depending on the message and your relationship, one might be able to argue that there is an explicit or implicit contract of confidentiality between partners.

cageface 15y ago

The problem with dumping gmail for another email provider is that at least half of the people with whom I correspond use gmail too so my messages wind up on their servers anyway. Edit: REALLY tired of all the idiotic downvoting lately. What I've said is factual. Don't be such a lazy fuck and post a rebuttal if you disagree.

sofifonfek 15y ago
Here's your rebuttal: shine another light on your situation and suddenly instead of having half the messages ending up on google servers anyways, you have half of your email freed from google servers which is better than having all on it there, privacywise.
- cageface 15y ago
  I imagine about 20% of my email correspondence is all it would take for Google to form a pretty accurate picture of my interests and habits and circles of acquaintance. That's the way machine learning usually works: you don't need a complete dataset to make useful inferences.
mechanical_fish 15y ago
Sure, but the difference is in the implied consent. If I continue to use Gmail beyond another week or two (what's that deadline, again?) I've implicitly consented to Google's policy on what they're permitted to do with my email. (One nice thing about Google: I can't really claim they haven't told me about this nonsense. They are taking the notification of their customers very seriously.) If, however, I'm not actually a Google user, but the Googlers secretly reassemble my mailboxes by sniffing the inboxes and outboxes of all of my friends and relations... well, that's a bigger transgression. They didn't ask my permission to do that, and when they asked my permission to do similar things I said no. So they'd better be good at keeping their activities secret, because if I ever learn that they did it I'll squawk a long, loud squawk. Sure, social disapproval doesn't have the force of law. (At least, not right away.) But it does have force.
- 15y ago