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The lock on my door is to prevent someone from pretending to be me to enter my property. This is not the same as trying to keep my stuff private or safe. Note
by kamjam 14y ago
The lock on my door is to prevent someone from pretending to be me to enter my property. This is not the same as trying to keep my stuff private or safe.
Note how your statement does not hold in the real world.
- rayiner 14y agoExcept Google's servers and whatnot are not your property. The lock keeps other Google customers from accessing "your stuff" not Google itself.
- hpguy 14y agoThe data I put in Google is MY property, I want that data protected and don't care less about servers just as I do not claim ownership to the school locker.
- shmerl 14y agoThe only way to ensure your data protection never changed - encryption. Google or not Google notwithstanding.
- rayiner 14y agoIf you want it protected, don't leave it in clear text in the custody of someone else who may or may not choose to hand it over to the authorities without your permission. In other news: you can't invoke the 4th amendment if you stash boxes of weed at a friend's house and he hands them over to the government when asked.
- unclebucknasty 14y agoYou are consistently morphing the issue and providing bad analogies. There are privacy policies and terms of service that cover what a service provider will share with whom and under what conditions. This represents an agreement between the user and the service. However, that is wholly different from the rights held by the government (IRS) to compel the service provider to provide information at the government's demand. Your analogy with the "boxes of weed" are similarly misguided and completely unrelated. The more relevant analogy would be that the government forced your friend's landlord to unlock his door without a warrant, entered, discovered the boxes of weed with your name on it, then arrested you. And, to put your analogy back into the subject e-mail context, if you e-mailed something incriminating to your friend and your friend opted to turn you in to the authorities, that is entirely different from the government gaining access to your e-mail of its own volition, and without a warrant.
- kamjam 14y agoSo if I send a letter via USPS do I have the right to expect that someone will not intercept and open that letter without getting the correct permission? Mail theft was a pretty serious crime in USA I am led to believe, regardless of whether it is sent in encrypted form or not...
- GauntletWizard 14y agoThe mailbox in the foyer of your building and whatnot are not your property. The lock keeps other tenants from accessing "your stuff" and not your landlord himself.
- rayiner 14y agoThere are special laws protecting mailboxes. They are actually property of the USPS. A better example is if you left a computer printout in your building's leasing office. That is not protected.
- belorn 14y agoIt should be mentioned that those laws are being eroded. The sanctiness of the post is no longer as safe as it used to be.
- sliverstorm 14y agoWe are talking about a transmission protocol, not a storage protocol. For storage, privacy and identity overlap. For transmission they do not.
- dclowd9901 14y agoSo the true comparison might be standing naked on your walkway to your front door from the curbside, and saying people don't have a right to take your picture. It's prviate property that's publicly viewable. When expressed this way, then it's actually pretty easy to see how it extends to the real world (you have no expectation of privacy in the publicly viewable space).
- Terretta 14y agoNo, think private car with tinted windows and a privacy partition shuttling you from home to the office. You'd be annoyed if your changing clothes in the back seat showed up on YouTube, because while your transport was along public routes, it was encapsulated in an expectation of privacy afforded you by your private car provider.
- superuser2 14y agoSo you don't mind if I wiretap all your phones? Email being transmitted by 3rd parties is not different from voice calls being transmitted by 3rd parties. Yes, you are trusting a provider, with the expectation that your provider will send the data where you've asked it to send the data, and nowhere else. This is still true whether you're talking postal service, landline voice calls, SMS, cellular voice calls, Skype, etc.
- rayiner 14y agoThe protections for phone calls arose back when phone lines were dumb analog wires between telephones. E-mail has never been like that, and it's always involved storing communications on a third party's systems.
- 14y ago