How can one trust someone with their email account. I believe that is just a weird thing to do no matter whether it was not such a threat before. But your email is something personal.
I mean seriously, if you own a car, there's a certain level of competence that is expected from the owner, even if it's just the basic stuff like putting the gas pump in the right spot, making sure to get the oil changed regularly, keeping an eye on the various dials and gauges to make sure your engine isn't on fire. There are no such expectancies in a smart phone, they just sell you the thing at a steep subsidy and send you on your merry way, and I find this interesting because you can do far more damage to your life or someone elses with a smartphone than a car.
Could you elaborate? I find it difficult to imagine how one kills somebody using a smartphone, while with a car it's pretty obvious.
I should've been more specific, obviously a car will do more physical damage but I'm talking less about actually hurting someone and more about ruining someone's life.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-t...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2955322/Justine-Sa...
I think that's a little simplistic. Social media like Twitter and Facebook collapse the context and expand the audience of a joke/meme [1] until it's almost sure to reach someone who will find it genuinely offensive.
In real life, a joke (good or bad) normally reaches a small number of people at a time. If it's good it may spread and if it's bad it will eventually meet with disapproval that will limit its spread. The online space inverts this dynamic completely by making the spread of someone else's mistake a performative act. Now a bad/offensive joke will spread like wildfire because those spreading it get to stick someone else's name on it and say: "look how bad of a joke this person made".
[1] http://hlwiki.slais.ubc.ca/index.php/Context_collapse_in_soc...
I find it disturbing that so many people seem to think Twitter and Facebook and the rest are just places to dump whatever thought runs through your brains as though nobody but the people you want to see it will ever see it. But again, that's what things like Facebook advertise as, and that's the type of content Twitter encourages.
The mistake in my opinion rather lies in doing such a strong reaction on a bad joke.
It's surprisingly more difficult than it used to be. Trying to get your server reputation just right so that gmail won't flag you as spam is much tougher than it was in the past, for example.
Speaking of spam - there is so much of it that something like gmail filters out.
I still send from gmail, although I use a personally-hosted (and aggressively firewalled/ monitored) box for receiving mail for things like password resets.
Wait until you hear about mint.com.... ;)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mint.com#Controversial_practic...
Since I strongly suspect that data's going to get sold by my bank, credit card company, insurance broker, loan provider and so on, the convenience of mint outweighs its disadvantages to me.
Tell that to your email provider..
They don't advertise to me and they let me encrypt my mail incoming, at rest and between my mail client and their servers.