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My little company has started working on a solution to this: http://parley.co http://parley.co Google will never store email in a properly encrypted fashion, b

My little company has started working on a solution to this: http://parley.co http://parley.co Google will never store email in a properly encrypted fashion, because their incentives lie with advertisers rather than with users. The only way for encrypted email to both work and reach mass appeal is for it to be implemented in such a way that private keys never touch the server while still being ridiculously simple to use at a highly accessible price point.

duaneb 14y ago
> Google will never store email in a properly encrypted fashion, because their incentives lie with advertisers rather than with users. Also I'm pretty sure search would suck with encryption, which is easily the primary draw of GMail for many people.
- napoleond 14y ago
  I agree that search is pretty nice to have, but most of the time I find myself searching for "messages from so-and-so" or "that email I wrote about X" which is still searchable after encryption (subject fields remain unencrypted, and you obviously also have to/from/date/time). For deeper searches, a client could decrypt and search a smaller time span (messages to X last week containing Y). It's still a trade-off, but I don't think it's a deal-breaker at all. I also think we overestimate how much non-geeks know about search features in GMail.
  - thezilch 14y ago
    Why are those fields still searchable after encryption? Doesn't that fly in the face of the article's utopian state of email? I can still see you're emailing with this contact, at this frequency, and with these subjects; seems like an awful lot of insecure leakage.
    - napoleond 14y ago
      PGP doesn't encrypt the recipient's address for obvious reasons. Subject and sender are useful for the recipient; it's a tradeoff, as all security is.
  - duaneb 14y ago
    Most of my searches are for content, unfortunately. I'm sure I could retrain myself for some of the queries to operate solely on metadata/subject, but not all of them. However, it's not like we can't do this now, at least for outgoing mail. PGP encryption works as well with gmail as it does with other encryptions, and you could just delete any non-encrypted incoming email. On a personal note, there's really nothing in my email that I feel a need to encrypt- at worst, someone might find eight digits of a credit card, or an old password, or an embarrassing email to an old girlfriend. Certainly nothing that would scare me out of the immense convenience of allowing GMail my unencrypted email.
    - napoleond 14y ago
      You have a really valid point, and I appreciate the feedback. (If we're way off the mark for how many people would use this, that's obviously a good thing to know.) PGP encryption can indeed work with any mail service but it's way too cumbersome for the average person, and "deleting any non-encrypted incoming email" wouldn't really be sufficient--to my knowledge there's no public data on the amount of time between Google flagging an item as being deleted and the time where it actually disappears from all disks but due to backups, etc, I would expect it to be a really long time. Either way, for external (non-gmail) messages unless both parties are using PGP the whole exchange can easily be intercepted at any point along the way (users are connected to gmail over SSL but external email servers typically aren't). Many people send sensitive information over email without any hesitation (eg. it's probably the most commonly used method for exchanging passwords) and the amount of ways your benign emails could be used against you (in court or otherwise) is probably scarier than you think. You don't need to be plotting a violent overthrow of the government for your words to be used against you. EDIT: FWIW, it's really hard to talk about this stuff without sounding like the guy on the street corner with a placard. I don't think a rogue employee at Google is going to destroy your life, nor do I expect the thought police to someday arrest you based on your email history. I do believe that we have a legitimate right to privacy in our communications which just isn't being met today, and I think that if more people were aware of the current reality they would agree. Protecting our data is ultimately our own responsibility, and I think there are better options for "normal" people than what's currently out there.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  Search would have to rely on a local storage option. More reason why email as a service on a centralized server shared by multiple interests without assured user security zones independent of the server has fundamental limitations.

duaneb 14y ago

> Google will never store email in a properly encrypted fashion, because their incentives lie with advertisers rather than with users. Also I'm pretty sure search would suck with encryption, which is easily the primary draw of GMail for many people.

napoleond 14y ago
I agree that search is pretty nice to have, but most of the time I find myself searching for "messages from so-and-so" or "that email I wrote about X" which is still searchable after encryption (subject fields remain unencrypted, and you obviously also have to/from/date/time). For deeper searches, a client could decrypt and search a smaller time span (messages to X last week containing Y). It's still a trade-off, but I don't think it's a deal-breaker at all. I also think we overestimate how much non-geeks know about search features in GMail.
- thezilch 14y ago
  Why are those fields still searchable after encryption? Doesn't that fly in the face of the article's utopian state of email? I can still see you're emailing with this contact, at this frequency, and with these subjects; seems like an awful lot of insecure leakage.
  - napoleond 14y ago
    PGP doesn't encrypt the recipient's address for obvious reasons. Subject and sender are useful for the recipient; it's a tradeoff, as all security is.
- duaneb 14y ago
  Most of my searches are for content, unfortunately. I'm sure I could retrain myself for some of the queries to operate solely on metadata/subject, but not all of them. However, it's not like we can't do this now, at least for outgoing mail. PGP encryption works as well with gmail as it does with other encryptions, and you could just delete any non-encrypted incoming email. On a personal note, there's really nothing in my email that I feel a need to encrypt- at worst, someone might find eight digits of a credit card, or an old password, or an embarrassing email to an old girlfriend. Certainly nothing that would scare me out of the immense convenience of allowing GMail my unencrypted email.
  - napoleond 14y ago
    You have a really valid point, and I appreciate the feedback. (If we're way off the mark for how many people would use this, that's obviously a good thing to know.) PGP encryption can indeed work with any mail service but it's way too cumbersome for the average person, and "deleting any non-encrypted incoming email" wouldn't really be sufficient--to my knowledge there's no public data on the amount of time between Google flagging an item as being deleted and the time where it actually disappears from all disks but due to backups, etc, I would expect it to be a really long time. Either way, for external (non-gmail) messages unless both parties are using PGP the whole exchange can easily be intercepted at any point along the way (users are connected to gmail over SSL but external email servers typically aren't). Many people send sensitive information over email without any hesitation (eg. it's probably the most commonly used method for exchanging passwords) and the amount of ways your benign emails could be used against you (in court or otherwise) is probably scarier than you think. You don't need to be plotting a violent overthrow of the government for your words to be used against you. EDIT: FWIW, it's really hard to talk about this stuff without sounding like the guy on the street corner with a placard. I don't think a rogue employee at Google is going to destroy your life, nor do I expect the thought police to someday arrest you based on your email history. I do believe that we have a legitimate right to privacy in our communications which just isn't being met today, and I think that if more people were aware of the current reality they would agree. Protecting our data is ultimately our own responsibility, and I think there are better options for "normal" people than what's currently out there.
dredmorbius 14y ago
Search would have to rely on a local storage option. More reason why email as a service on a centralized server shared by multiple interests without assured user security zones independent of the server has fundamental limitations.