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I think we should learn to pick our battles. Email itself is 100% insecure. You should assume that 100% of your email is available to the intelligence communi

I think we should learn to pick our battles. Email itself is 100% insecure. You should assume that 100% of your email is available to the intelligence community. (There's a reason Petraeus never sent any email to his mistress. According to William Binney, the NSA keeps copies of all emails sent to or received in the US.) So, they already know this email was sent to you. Stopwatching.us is going to present your signature to Congress anyway. If you're paranoid about the US government, it doesn't make sense to sign the petition. The only additional data they can receive from this innocent tracking code is that you read the letter (if you decided to display images) and that you clicked on a link (if you in-fact did). The intelligence community could conceivably do a lot of terrible things with everyone's phone records, everyone's Facebook data, everyone's Google searches... but if you want to remove measurement completely from the web, that's a bridge too far.

mike-cardwell 13y ago
Where you see "innocent tracking code" some people see "exploiting a hole in the way a piece of technology works to obtain information about people that they don't expect you to be able to obtain, and never gave you permission to collect"
- lelandbatey 13y ago
  I don't know. It's a bit like saying Sherlock Holmes invades your privacy because he's naturally more observant.
  - mike-cardwell 13y ago
    The information: 1.) Whether an email was opened 2.) When it was opened 3.) What IP was in use when it was opened Is not public. The fact that the sender of an email can exploit a loop hole in the technology so that they can gather that information, and the fact that it is commonly exploited to do so, does not make it ok. I would agree with your Sherlock Holmes analogy, but only if being "naturally more observant" falls within the category of climbing through somebodys bedroom window, hiding under their bed and observing what they're doing without them knowing you're there.
    - qu4z-2 13y ago
      In fairness, that sounds like something Sherlock Holmes would very plausibly do. Then again, we all know he's kind of an ass, if a lovable one.
gngeal 13y ago
You should assume that 100% of your email is available to the intelligence community. Well, at least the message bodies can be encrypted, can't they?
reidrac 13y ago
Unless you're using tracking mechanisms such as the discussed in the post, the only information the sender has is that the destination SMTP server acknowledged the delivery. After that, you know nothing. The mail could be deleted straight away and never delivered to a mailbox. I think it's a valid point, specially when this is part of a campaign for privacy. Is it that important for Mozilla to collect that information? EDIT: typo
derleth 13y ago
We should fight the battles we have in front of us. Mozilla should know better, and needs to be taught if it does not.
joe_the_user 13y ago
Just to quibble, most news sources claim Petraeus did send email to his mistress. That seems to be how he got caught http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/petraeus-emails-reference-sex-desk-article-1.1199953 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/petraeus-emails-ref...
- mmanfrin 13y ago
  I think most news sources simplified: what he did was write draft emails, then they would use the same account and read the drafts then delete them -- leaving no email.
  - uptown 13y ago
    And he was reportedly caught because an investigation into Paula Broadwell's email address, as the sender of threatening messages received by Jill Kelly, led back to David Petraeus.
x0x0 13y ago
As far as I understand, the argument is that, by not actually reading emails or listening to phone calls, but merely observing who communicated with whom, they're abiding by the law but getting quite a lot of information anyway. I don't know what you can do about phone calls, but for emails, email clients could simply send a stream of emails at random intervals to everyone in our address books. If you encrypt the email it's easy to set an ignore flag. Thus actual communications would be masked.

mike-cardwell 13y ago

Where you see "innocent tracking code" some people see "exploiting a hole in the way a piece of technology works to obtain information about people that they don't expect you to be able to obtain, and never gave you permission to collect"

lelandbatey 13y ago
I don't know. It's a bit like saying Sherlock Holmes invades your privacy because he's naturally more observant.
- mike-cardwell 13y ago
  The information: 1.) Whether an email was opened 2.) When it was opened 3.) What IP was in use when it was opened Is not public. The fact that the sender of an email can exploit a loop hole in the technology so that they can gather that information, and the fact that it is commonly exploited to do so, does not make it ok. I would agree with your Sherlock Holmes analogy, but only if being "naturally more observant" falls within the category of climbing through somebodys bedroom window, hiding under their bed and observing what they're doing without them knowing you're there.
  - qu4z-2 13y ago
    In fairness, that sounds like something Sherlock Holmes would very plausibly do. Then again, we all know he's kind of an ass, if a lovable one.

gngeal 13y ago

You should assume that 100% of your email is available to the intelligence community. Well, at least the message bodies can be encrypted, can't they?

reidrac 13y ago

Unless you're using tracking mechanisms such as the discussed in the post, the only information the sender has is that the destination SMTP server acknowledged the delivery. After that, you know nothing. The mail could be deleted straight away and never delivered to a mailbox. I think it's a valid point, specially when this is part of a campaign for privacy. Is it that important for Mozilla to collect that information? EDIT: typo

derleth 13y ago

We should fight the battles we have in front of us. Mozilla should know better, and needs to be taught if it does not.

joe_the_user 13y ago

Just to quibble, most news sources claim Petraeus did send email to his mistress. That seems to be how he got caught http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/petraeus-emails-reference-sex-desk-article-1.1199953 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/petraeus-emails-ref...

mmanfrin 13y ago
I think most news sources simplified: what he did was write draft emails, then they would use the same account and read the drafts then delete them -- leaving no email.
- uptown 13y ago
  And he was reportedly caught because an investigation into Paula Broadwell's email address, as the sender of threatening messages received by Jill Kelly, led back to David Petraeus.

x0x0 13y ago

As far as I understand, the argument is that, by not actually reading emails or listening to phone calls, but merely observing who communicated with whom, they're abiding by the law but getting quite a lot of information anyway. I don't know what you can do about phone calls, but for emails, email clients could simply send a stream of emails at random intervals to everyone in our address books. If you encrypt the email it's easy to set an ignore flag. Thus actual communications would be masked.