5 ms·

Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours

229 points by martey 12y ago

uptown 12y ago
Perhaps helps to explain the mega price-tags being placed on platforms like Whatsapp. If future generations are expected to rely less on email, and more on messaging platforms, then owning the dominant network in that space gives you a competitive angle to take-on Google.
sillysaurus3 12y ago
I've always wondered whether Google ever digs into communications in a situation where they're trying to decide whether to acquire a company. It seems like reading a company's email would be a reliable source of information about whether they're on a genuine trajectory or whether e.g. they're having trouble with their investors. I've never looked into whether it'd be illegal for them to do so. Surely in the EU it would be illegal, because privacy protection seems to be a serious concern there, but I don't know about the US. If you use Google Talk, every conversation you've ever had will be recorded and indexed and tied back to you. If you use gmail, same deal. Even your drafts of unsent emails will be. If you use AIM, same deal: every conversation you've ever had on it will certainly be logged somewhere and tied back to you. Yada yada, same deal for almost every chat program, because almost every chat program has no clientside encryption. If it does, it's not very popular, or it's hard enough to use to where people will think you're paranoid if you ask them to go out of their way to "download this chat program that lets us talk without anyone logging it." I think the endgame here is to watch what you say. It's safest to assume every text conversation is public. How many of us have said something in text to our families or friends that we'd be extremely uncomfortable saying publicly? It's a little unsettling. Then again, hopefully when the TextSecure people ship their browser-based chat program things will improve somewhat, because you'll be able to talk to someone else without the conversation being duly noted. (There will probably still be metadata that ties you to the fact that you're talking to someone, but at least the content will be protected.) Hopefully it will be easy to use... I wonder if they need any help in that capacity.
- sheetjs 12y ago
  > It's safest to assume every text conversation is public. Sadly, people who have been saying this for more than a decade were derided as paranoid.
- paul 12y ago
  No. That's not just evil, and most likely illegal, it's stupid too. It's too easy for something like that to leak, and the damage would be enormous.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    Hi Paul. Sorry, I didn't mean to write a conspiratorial comment about Google. I meant to call attention to the fact that every textual conversation you've ever had has probably been logged, and just because our legal and cultural framework presently frowns upon digging through those logs, that may not always be the case in the future. The logs will persist even after our cultural norms change. So it seems important to come up with a technological solution to the problem of how to communicate without all of it being logged. It's a difficult problem because it's hard to get other people to actually use whatever you come up with. That's why I'm crossing my fingers that TextSecure's browser plugin will take off, because if it's as easy to use as email and as powerful as email, it could have a very tiny chance of becoming the next popular communications platform. At that point no one would have to trust any company to preserve privacy, which seems valuable. EDIT: I'm confused why my comments were moved to the bottom of this thread, because they don't seem offtopic. For example, the second topmost comment is also about encryption: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7731216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7731216
    - nutjob2 12y ago
      "the fact that every textual conversation you've ever had is logged" That's patently untrue. What are you basing that on besides your own paranoia?
arb99 12y ago
Same with Google Analytics. GA is the standard analytics for a huge % of websites - so even if a website doesn't use GA for tracking traffic, Google still has the referral data. And things like Google Adsense (i'm pretty sure that sends back the referral data too, for tracking click fraud). There is no way really to avoid Google knowing a lot about you/your website anymore.
- regecks 12y ago
  It's still possible to avoid leaking information to GA, by rewriting outgoing links to go through a redirector. Many sites do this (including Google Encrypted Search, but its not perfect). The email problem sucks though. We need end-to-end encryption, on all mail, today.
  - pestaa 12y ago
    You are right about the outgoing links on your site to avoid leakage (this is what well implemented search engines like DuckDuckGo does as well), but I think GP talked about the incoming links of your site. Your pages will appear as exit pages in Google Analytics which you cannot do a thing about.
  - Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago
    Using encryption still doesn't prevent massive leak of metadata, and wasn't it news just a few days ago that they do kill people based on metadata. Btw. I've been also running my own mail servers for ages and have been fed up with Gmail users.
- yuvadam 12y ago
  Google Analytics (and other tracking cookies/scripts) are actually very easy to evade, by using browser extensions such as Ghostery, Ad-block Plus and NoScript.
- Smerity 12y ago
  You hit the nail on the head. Google Analytics is on a substantial proportion of the Internet. 65% of the top 10k sites, 63.9% of the top 100k, and 50.5% of the top million[1]. My own results from a research project I did using the Common Crawl[2] corpus estimates approximately 39.7% of the 535 million pages processed so far have GA on them. The real key to tracking is the referrer data. For the vast majority of clicks, you land on a site that has Google Analytics or you've just left one that did. As Google Analytics tracks your referrer, that means they still have your full browsing history if you jump from GA => !GA => GA => !GA => ... According to my research[3], Google gets activity information on 51.43% of the 42 billion links analyzed in the 535 million page corpus as either the start or end of the link uses Google Analytics. This activity means they can accurately track browsing history on most sites, even those that don't use GA, simply as timing information, referrers, and knowledge of the web graph end up leaking user activity. Used in an anonymized fashion, this is beneficial as it helps Google understand real world web traffic and hence rank search results accordingly (far better than simulated activity based upon PageRank or similar). In the theoretical situation you drop anonymization is where this gets troublesome. If you're interested, there are more details at "Measuring the impact of Google Analytics"[3], though much of the discussion is on Hadoop + Common Crawl. For a privacy focused write-up (primarily worried about the NSA using Google Analytics), refer to "Google, make Google Analytics HTTPS by default"[4]. P.S. Everyone who notes "Google Analytics is easy to evade" are correct but missing the broader point -- the majority of web users will never do that. [1]: http://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Google-Analytics http://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Google-Analytics [2]: http://commoncrawl.org/ http://commoncrawl.org/ [3]: http://smerity.com/cs205_ga/ http://smerity.com/cs205_ga/ [4]: http://smerity.com/articles/2013/google_analytics_and_nsa.html http://smerity.com/articles/2013/google_analytics_and_nsa.ht...
TempleOSV207 12y ago
God is perfectly just.
cromwellian 12y ago
I think if you're really concerned about the Feds snooping on email, you need to use end-to-end encryption. Any large ISP or portal is going to be a juicy target, and since the majority of people don't want to run their own email servers, the only recourse is not to depend on trusting the servers. Even if you managed to convince everyone to leave G-Mail, they'd still congeal back into another 2-3 big services that the NSA can target.
- nutjob2 12y ago
  If the NSA is targeting you, or you think they're targeting you, then your email provider is the least of your problems.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    As Bruce Schneier has commented: he's not against targeted surveillance, undertaken with cause and a specific warrant. It's bulk surveillance of everyone, everywhere and at all times, that's a problem. Taking measures which raise the cost of surveillance helps ensure that if they get your data, it's because they really want it. Not just because they can.
  - anilgulecha 12y ago
    This standard response misses the nuance of end-to-end encryption: If the default everywhere was EoE encryption, it becomes significantly harder for anyone to target you (for an average value of you)
    - XorNot 12y ago
      Well every second start proposition on HN is "you give us access to your..." So if the default was EoE, it still wouldn't matter.
      - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
        this is really pedantic but why is End To End Encryption shortened as EoE?
dasmithii 12y ago
I find it incredibly odd that I've never considered this before. I suppose end-to-end encryption is today's only defense against top-down surveillance. That said, I wonder if meshnet protocol could be utilized as an alternative. Although the traditional mesh network is impractical at scale, a virtual version, or an email-serving proxy network of some sort, could be beneficial. Well, beneficial if you'd consider keeping email off Google's centralized servers a good thing.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  We had something of a meshnet protocol with regards to email previously, or at least, it was generally tenable to run a mailserver on any arbitrary IP address at one time. That ended pretty much by the late 1990s due to the ever growing onslaught of spam. Today it can be (and often is) frustrating even for established companies to get their mail delivered to all sources. I've had repeated frustrations especially with Yahoo, but also AOL (both continue to have a large number of addresses, if not active accounts -- problems in scrubbing old email addresses is another challenge). Larger companies may have their own idiosyncrasies regarding accepting email -- even with SPF and DKIM records, I've not infrequently encountered companies (some of which, granted, do things involved making littler things out of little things called atoms) who requested (and presumably require) the specific IP address of our outbound mailservers for communications. More generally, email badly wants to have some sort of reputation layer put on top of it, though how to accomplish this has eluded general solution (SPF and DKIM are only band-aids, and already break a lot of legacy behavior). Total encryption would be good, including of headers. It's a bit of a mess.
  - mike_hearn 12y ago
    All major mail providers already use sophisticated reputation systems. The difficulty of calculating global reputations for the entire internet, quickly and with statistically meaningful results is one of the reasons email consolidates under the control of a handful of big companies. You really don't want to try and replicate that on your own. Source: I was part of the Gmail spam/abuse team for several years.
reedlaw 12y ago
Why not offer to host the email accounts of those you contact most frequently? Probably most of them couldn't host their own email server, and if you've already gone to the effort to do so, you can help them increase their privacy as well.
- mlinksva 12y ago
  They might rather unknown Googlers have access to their email than a friend or family member.
- deptadapt 12y ago
  Because running a mail server can be a pretty big responsibility, especially if you're letting others send mail from it. The more people using your server, the more important it will be to monitor for abuse and deal with abuse reports. When I first set up my mail server I was pretty excited about being able to help everyone I know get their email away from Google, Hotmail etc. But once I had it running, I quickly realized that I didn't really want to give to very many people. Even if I trust all of my friends not to abuse, I cannot trust all of their computers.
rmrfrmrf 12y ago
E-mail is not and has never been a secure method of communication.
- autodidakto 12y ago
  Correct. Running your own server, etc, doesn't matter. If what you're doing on the internet isn't encrypted by you and decrypted by a trusted and competent recipient... consider it more or less public.
Dident 12y ago
hy
Dident 12y ago
my classmate's half-sister makes $60 every hour on the internet . She has been out of work for five months but last month her pay check was $20296 just working on the internet for a few hours. check this........... www.Works6.Com
Dident 12y ago
my classmate's half-sister makes $60 every hour on the internet . She has been out of work for five months but last month her pay check was $20296 just working on the internet for a few hours. check this........... WWW.WℴRKS6.COM
ilolu 12y ago
Why is google being targeted with all such write ups but Facebook gets a pass. Facebook has many of my photos because it has all of yours. Facebook knows my browsing habits because all of you have have like button in your site etc etc.
- noahm 12y ago
  Because facebook only has my pictures if I choose to post them there. This is easy to avoid. Facebook only has my browsing habits if I choose to allow content from their servers while viewing non-facebook content. This is also avoidable, albeit less easily. Avoiding sending email to gmail users is far more difficult. Avoiding receiving email from gmail users is even more difficult. Additionally, the cost (at least measured subjectively in terms of inconvenience) of avoiding all contact with gmail users is far greater than the cost of avoiding facebook. So, to answer your question more directly, facebook doesn't "get a pass". Facebook simply doesn't get used.
  - ilolu 12y ago
    I use Ghostery and block Facebook content from other sites. But what I don't like about Google or Facebook's behavior is that that none of my non-techy friends know that they are being tracked every where. And you cant expect them to understand it too. I find that behavior bad.
  - ericleung 12y ago
    Not quite sure I agree with that. I think the argument is that Facebook has pictures of me as long as any one of my friends has a picture of me, and has posted it on their own Facebook. Similar to the problem with Google having access to a large percentage of emails, Facebook will have pictures of me regardless of whether I choose to personally have a Facebook account or not. Assuming that I do have a Facebook, with a network of friends, they can also tag me in their pictures (and therefore available to Facebook) even if my own privacy settings are turned all the way up.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Facebook only has my browsing habits if I choose to allow content from their servers while viewing non-facebook content. This is also avoidable, albeit less easily. To most people, it's black magic. In fact, they don't even know that such tracking is possible.
eps 12y ago
I played with an idea of an off-site delivery the GMail-destined emails. Basically instead of an actual email the recipient would get a link to an https'd page on my mail server and a brief note explaining that due to delivery policy the message is available only at the link. The reason why I started looking at this was that I was buying a house and the broker person was using gmail to handle the transaction. From negotiation to all the forms with all juicy details. I switched him back to the fax mode, but it got me thinking that it'd be nice to have a system in place that would try and offset such negligence, automatically. I never got past a rough prototype though, but perhaps I should've.
- blueskin_ 12y ago
  Sounds great; I'd love to have this in an interface compatible with Postfix.
- andreasvc 12y ago
  I don't see why you would single out Gmail at this point. You're basically rejecting email as a secure medium (I don't disagree).
  - claudius 12y ago
    E-mail between secure servers is perfectly secure (and end-to-end encryption only adds content encryption but keeps the amount of metadata generated the same). The problem is that Google’s email servers are not secure; nor are those of any other email provider. Strictly speaking, not even hosting your own dedicated server somewhere will protect you from these issues.
    - andreasvc 12y ago
      Uh no it's not perfectly secure because if you don't use e2e encryption you only get opportunistic TLS and you can't control whether your mail will be transported over unencrypted connections. Furthermore, the contents of the email arrives unencrypted at every mail server. So you're basically agreeing with exactly what I said ...
blueskin_ 12y ago
"Peter pointed out that if all of your friends use GMail, Google has your email anyway." Peter reminds me of the old "If you have nothing to hide..." fallacy. I'd have expected more from the EFF. Yes, anything really sensitive should be PGP'd anyway, but using gmail still gives google the opportunity to do analytics's.
- ronaldx 12y ago
  I also found it surprising that Peter Eckersley would be satisfied to justify his use of Gmail in this way. Peter seems to believe that using Gmail makes his friends' privacy incrementally worse, and yet he is contributing to this problem. What he really means is: Gmail is more convenient than the other options - there is no better solution to this. And, that's the problem.
perlpimp 12y ago
Not if you use GPG. or PGP.
- PeterisP 12y ago
  What would that change? In any GPG/PGP solution that I'd use, the encryption would be automated and transparent. In practice, the web-mail-client would anyway decrypt, store and index that email for convenience - no matter what you do, if your recipients/senders use some 3rd party email service, that email service would have access to your emails after the GPG/PGP layer is removed. What GPG/PGP achieve is defense against MITM/phishing impersonation and secrecy while in transit between email providers; what it doesn't neccessarily achieve is secrecy in storage and defense from your e-mail client software developer. Coincidentally, these are the exact same security characteristics that a gmail user mailing another gmail user has - there are no third parties in transit; gmail can prevent insertions in the middle with a faked sender; but the stored emails are vulnerable to google itself and legal requests made to them.
lewisflude 12y ago
I don't really see this as a problem. The kind of language makes me think of those that wear tinfoil-hats. I always ask myself, who cares? Worst case scenario, Google will sell this data to a government and I'll go to jail. The effort required to secure email at this point isn't worth the time or effort it'd take to maintain.

229 points by martey 12y ago

Perhaps helps to explain the mega price-tags being placed on platforms like Whatsapp. If future generations are expected to rely less on email, and more on messaging platforms, then owning the dominant network in that space gives you a competitive angle to take-on Google.

sillysaurus3 12y ago

I've always wondered whether Google ever digs into communications in a situation where they're trying to decide whether to acquire a company. It seems like reading a company's email would be a reliable source of information about whether they're on a genuine trajectory or whether e.g. they're having trouble with their investors. I've never looked into whether it'd be illegal for them to do so. Surely in the EU it would be illegal, because privacy protection seems to be a serious concern there, but I don't know about the US. If you use Google Talk, every conversation you've ever had will be recorded and indexed and tied back to you. If you use gmail, same deal. Even your drafts of unsent emails will be. If you use AIM, same deal: every conversation you've ever had on it will certainly be logged somewhere and tied back to you. Yada yada, same deal for almost every chat program, because almost every chat program has no clientside encryption. If it does, it's not very popular, or it's hard enough to use to where people will think you're paranoid if you ask them to go out of their way to "download this chat program that lets us talk without anyone logging it." I think the endgame here is to watch what you say. It's safest to assume every text conversation is public. How many of us have said something in text to our families or friends that we'd be extremely uncomfortable saying publicly? It's a little unsettling. Then again, hopefully when the TextSecure people ship their browser-based chat program things will improve somewhat, because you'll be able to talk to someone else without the conversation being duly noted. (There will probably still be metadata that ties you to the fact that you're talking to someone, but at least the content will be protected.) Hopefully it will be easy to use... I wonder if they need any help in that capacity.

sheetjs 12y ago
> It's safest to assume every text conversation is public. Sadly, people who have been saying this for more than a decade were derided as paranoid.
paul 12y ago
No. That's not just evil, and most likely illegal, it's stupid too. It's too easy for something like that to leak, and the damage would be enormous.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  Hi Paul. Sorry, I didn't mean to write a conspiratorial comment about Google. I meant to call attention to the fact that every textual conversation you've ever had has probably been logged, and just because our legal and cultural framework presently frowns upon digging through those logs, that may not always be the case in the future. The logs will persist even after our cultural norms change. So it seems important to come up with a technological solution to the problem of how to communicate without all of it being logged. It's a difficult problem because it's hard to get other people to actually use whatever you come up with. That's why I'm crossing my fingers that TextSecure's browser plugin will take off, because if it's as easy to use as email and as powerful as email, it could have a very tiny chance of becoming the next popular communications platform. At that point no one would have to trust any company to preserve privacy, which seems valuable. EDIT: I'm confused why my comments were moved to the bottom of this thread, because they don't seem offtopic. For example, the second topmost comment is also about encryption: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7731216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7731216
  - nutjob2 12y ago
    "the fact that every textual conversation you've ever had is logged" That's patently untrue. What are you basing that on besides your own paranoia?

arb99 12y ago

Same with Google Analytics. GA is the standard analytics for a huge % of websites - so even if a website doesn't use GA for tracking traffic, Google still has the referral data. And things like Google Adsense (i'm pretty sure that sends back the referral data too, for tracking click fraud). There is no way really to avoid Google knowing a lot about you/your website anymore.

regecks 12y ago
It's still possible to avoid leaking information to GA, by rewriting outgoing links to go through a redirector. Many sites do this (including Google Encrypted Search, but its not perfect). The email problem sucks though. We need end-to-end encryption, on all mail, today.
- pestaa 12y ago
  You are right about the outgoing links on your site to avoid leakage (this is what well implemented search engines like DuckDuckGo does as well), but I think GP talked about the incoming links of your site. Your pages will appear as exit pages in Google Analytics which you cannot do a thing about.
- Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago
  Using encryption still doesn't prevent massive leak of metadata, and wasn't it news just a few days ago that they do kill people based on metadata. Btw. I've been also running my own mail servers for ages and have been fed up with Gmail users.
yuvadam 12y ago
Google Analytics (and other tracking cookies/scripts) are actually very easy to evade, by using browser extensions such as Ghostery, Ad-block Plus and NoScript.
Smerity 12y ago
You hit the nail on the head. Google Analytics is on a substantial proportion of the Internet. 65% of the top 10k sites, 63.9% of the top 100k, and 50.5% of the top million[1]. My own results from a research project I did using the Common Crawl[2] corpus estimates approximately 39.7% of the 535 million pages processed so far have GA on them. The real key to tracking is the referrer data. For the vast majority of clicks, you land on a site that has Google Analytics or you've just left one that did. As Google Analytics tracks your referrer, that means they still have your full browsing history if you jump from GA => !GA => GA => !GA => ... According to my research[3], Google gets activity information on 51.43% of the 42 billion links analyzed in the 535 million page corpus as either the start or end of the link uses Google Analytics. This activity means they can accurately track browsing history on most sites, even those that don't use GA, simply as timing information, referrers, and knowledge of the web graph end up leaking user activity. Used in an anonymized fashion, this is beneficial as it helps Google understand real world web traffic and hence rank search results accordingly (far better than simulated activity based upon PageRank or similar). In the theoretical situation you drop anonymization is where this gets troublesome. If you're interested, there are more details at "Measuring the impact of Google Analytics"[3], though much of the discussion is on Hadoop + Common Crawl. For a privacy focused write-up (primarily worried about the NSA using Google Analytics), refer to "Google, make Google Analytics HTTPS by default"[4]. P.S. Everyone who notes "Google Analytics is easy to evade" are correct but missing the broader point -- the majority of web users will never do that. [1]: http://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Google-Analytics http://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Google-Analytics [2]: http://commoncrawl.org/ http://commoncrawl.org/ [3]: http://smerity.com/cs205_ga/ http://smerity.com/cs205_ga/ [4]: http://smerity.com/articles/2013/google_analytics_and_nsa.html http://smerity.com/articles/2013/google_analytics_and_nsa.ht...

TempleOSV207 12y ago

God is perfectly just.

cromwellian 12y ago

I think if you're really concerned about the Feds snooping on email, you need to use end-to-end encryption. Any large ISP or portal is going to be a juicy target, and since the majority of people don't want to run their own email servers, the only recourse is not to depend on trusting the servers. Even if you managed to convince everyone to leave G-Mail, they'd still congeal back into another 2-3 big services that the NSA can target.

nutjob2 12y ago
If the NSA is targeting you, or you think they're targeting you, then your email provider is the least of your problems.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  As Bruce Schneier has commented: he's not against targeted surveillance, undertaken with cause and a specific warrant. It's bulk surveillance of everyone, everywhere and at all times, that's a problem. Taking measures which raise the cost of surveillance helps ensure that if they get your data, it's because they really want it. Not just because they can.
- anilgulecha 12y ago
  This standard response misses the nuance of end-to-end encryption: If the default everywhere was EoE encryption, it becomes significantly harder for anyone to target you (for an average value of you)
  - XorNot 12y ago
    Well every second start proposition on HN is "you give us access to your..." So if the default was EoE, it still wouldn't matter.
    - lifeisstillgood 12y ago
      this is really pedantic but why is End To End Encryption shortened as EoE?

dasmithii 12y ago

I find it incredibly odd that I've never considered this before. I suppose end-to-end encryption is today's only defense against top-down surveillance. That said, I wonder if meshnet protocol could be utilized as an alternative. Although the traditional mesh network is impractical at scale, a virtual version, or an email-serving proxy network of some sort, could be beneficial. Well, beneficial if you'd consider keeping email off Google's centralized servers a good thing.

dredmorbius 12y ago
We had something of a meshnet protocol with regards to email previously, or at least, it was generally tenable to run a mailserver on any arbitrary IP address at one time. That ended pretty much by the late 1990s due to the ever growing onslaught of spam. Today it can be (and often is) frustrating even for established companies to get their mail delivered to all sources. I've had repeated frustrations especially with Yahoo, but also AOL (both continue to have a large number of addresses, if not active accounts -- problems in scrubbing old email addresses is another challenge). Larger companies may have their own idiosyncrasies regarding accepting email -- even with SPF and DKIM records, I've not infrequently encountered companies (some of which, granted, do things involved making littler things out of little things called atoms) who requested (and presumably require) the specific IP address of our outbound mailservers for communications. More generally, email badly wants to have some sort of reputation layer put on top of it, though how to accomplish this has eluded general solution (SPF and DKIM are only band-aids, and already break a lot of legacy behavior). Total encryption would be good, including of headers. It's a bit of a mess.
- mike_hearn 12y ago
  All major mail providers already use sophisticated reputation systems. The difficulty of calculating global reputations for the entire internet, quickly and with statistically meaningful results is one of the reasons email consolidates under the control of a handful of big companies. You really don't want to try and replicate that on your own. Source: I was part of the Gmail spam/abuse team for several years.

reedlaw 12y ago

Why not offer to host the email accounts of those you contact most frequently? Probably most of them couldn't host their own email server, and if you've already gone to the effort to do so, you can help them increase their privacy as well.

mlinksva 12y ago
They might rather unknown Googlers have access to their email than a friend or family member.
deptadapt 12y ago
Because running a mail server can be a pretty big responsibility, especially if you're letting others send mail from it. The more people using your server, the more important it will be to monitor for abuse and deal with abuse reports. When I first set up my mail server I was pretty excited about being able to help everyone I know get their email away from Google, Hotmail etc. But once I had it running, I quickly realized that I didn't really want to give to very many people. Even if I trust all of my friends not to abuse, I cannot trust all of their computers.

rmrfrmrf 12y ago

E-mail is not and has never been a secure method of communication.

autodidakto 12y ago
Correct. Running your own server, etc, doesn't matter. If what you're doing on the internet isn't encrypted by you and decrypted by a trusted and competent recipient... consider it more or less public.

Dident 12y ago

my classmate's half-sister makes $60 every hour on the internet . She has been out of work for five months but last month her pay check was $20296 just working on the internet for a few hours. check this........... www.Works6.Com

Dident 12y ago

ilolu 12y ago

Why is google being targeted with all such write ups but Facebook gets a pass. Facebook has many of my photos because it has all of yours. Facebook knows my browsing habits because all of you have have like button in your site etc etc.

noahm 12y ago
Because facebook only has my pictures if I choose to post them there. This is easy to avoid. Facebook only has my browsing habits if I choose to allow content from their servers while viewing non-facebook content. This is also avoidable, albeit less easily. Avoiding sending email to gmail users is far more difficult. Avoiding receiving email from gmail users is even more difficult. Additionally, the cost (at least measured subjectively in terms of inconvenience) of avoiding all contact with gmail users is far greater than the cost of avoiding facebook. So, to answer your question more directly, facebook doesn't "get a pass". Facebook simply doesn't get used.
- ilolu 12y ago
  I use Ghostery and block Facebook content from other sites. But what I don't like about Google or Facebook's behavior is that that none of my non-techy friends know that they are being tracked every where. And you cant expect them to understand it too. I find that behavior bad.
- ericleung 12y ago
  Not quite sure I agree with that. I think the argument is that Facebook has pictures of me as long as any one of my friends has a picture of me, and has posted it on their own Facebook. Similar to the problem with Google having access to a large percentage of emails, Facebook will have pictures of me regardless of whether I choose to personally have a Facebook account or not. Assuming that I do have a Facebook, with a network of friends, they can also tag me in their pictures (and therefore available to Facebook) even if my own privacy settings are turned all the way up.
- icebraining 12y ago
  Facebook only has my browsing habits if I choose to allow content from their servers while viewing non-facebook content. This is also avoidable, albeit less easily. To most people, it's black magic. In fact, they don't even know that such tracking is possible.

eps 12y ago

I played with an idea of an off-site delivery the GMail-destined emails. Basically instead of an actual email the recipient would get a link to an https'd page on my mail server and a brief note explaining that due to delivery policy the message is available only at the link. The reason why I started looking at this was that I was buying a house and the broker person was using gmail to handle the transaction. From negotiation to all the forms with all juicy details. I switched him back to the fax mode, but it got me thinking that it'd be nice to have a system in place that would try and offset such negligence, automatically. I never got past a rough prototype though, but perhaps I should've.

blueskin_ 12y ago
Sounds great; I'd love to have this in an interface compatible with Postfix.
andreasvc 12y ago
I don't see why you would single out Gmail at this point. You're basically rejecting email as a secure medium (I don't disagree).
- claudius 12y ago
  E-mail between secure servers is perfectly secure (and end-to-end encryption only adds content encryption but keeps the amount of metadata generated the same). The problem is that Google’s email servers are not secure; nor are those of any other email provider. Strictly speaking, not even hosting your own dedicated server somewhere will protect you from these issues.
  - andreasvc 12y ago
    Uh no it's not perfectly secure because if you don't use e2e encryption you only get opportunistic TLS and you can't control whether your mail will be transported over unencrypted connections. Furthermore, the contents of the email arrives unencrypted at every mail server. So you're basically agreeing with exactly what I said ...

blueskin_ 12y ago

"Peter pointed out that if all of your friends use GMail, Google has your email anyway." Peter reminds me of the old "If you have nothing to hide..." fallacy. I'd have expected more from the EFF. Yes, anything really sensitive should be PGP'd anyway, but using gmail still gives google the opportunity to do analytics's.

ronaldx 12y ago
I also found it surprising that Peter Eckersley would be satisfied to justify his use of Gmail in this way. Peter seems to believe that using Gmail makes his friends' privacy incrementally worse, and yet he is contributing to this problem. What he really means is: Gmail is more convenient than the other options - there is no better solution to this. And, that's the problem.

perlpimp 12y ago

Not if you use GPG. or PGP.

PeterisP 12y ago
What would that change? In any GPG/PGP solution that I'd use, the encryption would be automated and transparent. In practice, the web-mail-client would anyway decrypt, store and index that email for convenience - no matter what you do, if your recipients/senders use some 3rd party email service, that email service would have access to your emails after the GPG/PGP layer is removed. What GPG/PGP achieve is defense against MITM/phishing impersonation and secrecy while in transit between email providers; what it doesn't neccessarily achieve is secrecy in storage and defense from your e-mail client software developer. Coincidentally, these are the exact same security characteristics that a gmail user mailing another gmail user has - there are no third parties in transit; gmail can prevent insertions in the middle with a faked sender; but the stored emails are vulnerable to google itself and legal requests made to them.

lewisflude 12y ago

I don't really see this as a problem. The kind of language makes me think of those that wear tinfoil-hats. I always ask myself, who cares? Worst case scenario, Google will sell this data to a government and I'll go to jail. The effort required to secure email at this point isn't worth the time or effort it'd take to maintain.