Stop the paranoia: it doesn't matter if Google reads our email

Privacy is created by social norms. It's no technical challenge for me to borrow your paper mail from your mailbox, steam it open, read it, copy the bits I find interesting, seal it up again, and replace it in your mailbox. But, in doing so, it's understood that I'm doing an awful thing. It's so awful that it's against the law:

http://www.wbrz.com/news/postal-workers-accused-of-tampering...

... and, all else being equal, juries will not be inclined to sympathize with me.

Similarly, it's somewhere between very rude and illegal, depending on circumstances, to intercept or interfere with someone's email. If you happen to glance at someone's email you're expected to keep politely silent about it, as you would be if you happened to glimpse your neighbor through a window of their house. You're certainly expected, under pain of felony charges, not to tamper with or forge someone's email, just as you're expected to avoid entering your neighbor's house without knocking even if the front door is standing open.

Google, on the other hand, seems to be constantly trying to establish the precedent that it's perfectly normal and polite for any aspect of your life - currently including, but presumably not forever limited to: the state of your front yard, the contents of your photo album, the list of movies you've watched on YouTube, and the contents of your mailbox - to be sampled, data-mined, correlated, and archived forever by entities completely outside your knowledge or control so long as those entities are using secret algorithms to do it.

If you'd tolerate this behavior in a friend, you may by all means continue to have Google as a friend. I, however, am getting increasingly uncomfortable with Google sitting in my living room, and am increasingly tempted to escort them politely but firmly to the door and then deliberately misplace their address.

First: No, Google is not evil. Nor good, for what it's worth. It's a random company that won a lot of sympathy in the past and became unavoidable (for better or worse) on the internet.

If someone cries that Google is turning mad, evil and creepy, go ahead with posts like this. If people start thinking about the implications of throwing every piece of their online identity into one corporations data center: Stop mocking that.

Yes, you can have less secure solutions. Yeah, email isn't a secure protocol to begin with and pgp/gpg is mostly dead by now, used only by geeks that line up to compare their fingerprints and passports, calling that a 'party' (Hey, I did that. I'm allowed to make fun of my own subculture).

That's totally missing the point. For some people it is just too scary to give email, calendar, news feed, instant messages, mobile operating system, 'office' aka text editor/spread sheet data, pictures, location data (latitude), travel data (maps, google tracks) and probably a lot I missed to a _single legal entity_.

We didn't even touch the 'use Google as openid provider' part here, which puts your 3rd party accounts in Google's hands.

I wouldn't entrust those details to my wife or brother and recently, without fearmongering or throwing my hands in the air and running in circles, decided that Google is not the right place for that level of access either.

If you mock that, if you call that paranoia, then you're insulting intelligent people making a conscious (and - private/intimate. Even if discussed in public) decision. The headline of this article alone is out of line.

You need to consider the loss implications if your email is compromised, given various scenarios (the whole account? one message? etc.) and the sorts of information you have in it (journalists working with protected sources vs. griping about your spousal unit malfunctioning). And consider who the likely threat actors would be.

In some cases, hosting on Google would be a spectacularly bad idea. If I were Jacob Applebaum, I wouldn't even think about it, because of concerns about "lawful intercept" and whatnot. But in my case, given the additional security features (two-factor auth, HTTPS everywhere, etc.), and my particular threat model, Gmail does the job just fine.

responding to government information requests without due process. google isn't in the business of protecting civil liberties.

i wonder if they're filtering our email on a mass scale for suspicious activities, as defined by Dept Homeland Security? if they were, it would be classified, and none of us would know the difference.

heck, turns out one of my buddies used to be a drug dealer, i had no idea, and at the time he was all over my social graph. i wonder if it will come up next time I apply for a security clearance. I might never know - an old manager once told me how clearance applications have a way of getting lost in the system when things aren't perfect - once eyebrows are raised, you enter a whole new set of processes and red tape that nobody wants to deal with.

I understand that some people are too lazy (or whatever) and use Gmail. But do you really assume that you won't switch your mail or chat provider for the rest of your life? That's exactly like the people who used @hotmail.com a decade ago.

Your own domain costs $10-20 per year and it's trivial to setup (either on your own server or with Google Apps). And if you decide at some point that you want to switch to another provider, all you need to do is to point a few records (MX, XMPP, SPF) to your new provider - this only takes a few minutes to do.

I think it's totally legitimate for consumers to be concerned about the companies that host their email. Unlike social networking, email is for "important stuff", and while webmail providers like Google generally have protections in place to prevent random employees from reading your mail, the fact is that the possibility still exists, and incidents have occurred at companies like Google of rogue employees illicitly reading end-users' email. Someone with access to your Facebook account is unlikely to get access to your bank statements, mortgage emails, or travel plans. But if someone can read all your email, they'll likely get all these and much more.

The only genuinely safe long-term solution is for mail hosts to store their users' email encrypted in such a way that only the end users (and not the company) can read the email. This would preclude server-side ad targeting, but users should -- and I believe, will -- ultimately demand it.

If you want absolute security, you are not gonna get it from nobody, and that includes Microsoft. Any information stored on a server you don't own is not secure, any information passed trough the internet unencrypted is also not secure. If you want absolute security you need to make sure that the information that you want to send is encrypted when transferring and only gets decoded and stored on servers you own and know to be safe from anyone, in other words, don't use email at all, because it's not secure by design, most of the time, it's vulnerable to man in the middle attacks.

Shame on Microsoft for not competing with features instead of FUD.

I guess I shouldn't be that surprised that they've resorted to attack ads though; Office 365 is one of the worst web apps I've ever used. I don't even necessarily disagree with their general goal of educating people about how Gmail works, but that's like a textbook definition of FUD if I've ever seen one.

However, in the longer run, the question then is: like a snail mailbox which is fundamentally a right of each person/household - does our individual email in this increasingly connected world fall into the category of individual's right? Should the government or semi-government be responsible for securing the privacy of individuals? Should email be technically free in a real sense? I know this train of thought has several other inter-related points as well but ... we can't just ignore Gmail's reading of our emails - even algorithmically - without paying some attention.

Yes, from a security standpoint each single one of us might be better off with using Gmail, instead of using their own mailserver or a service provided by a local company.

But when looking at the society as a whole the worst that could happen is giving a few companies a monopoly on our communication. Especially when we don't need to do this, because we already use a distributed and decentralized network.

For me the second argument is at least as important as the first one. But I fully understand when people don't look at the wider implications of their decisions and just use the easiest route.

I have read far too much history and current events to believe that we are in a new and trustworthy era of humanity.

The guy seems to have no concept of realistically balancing risks. Yes your email is somewhat insecure, but for most people, the risks are things like your boss or family members finding out that your talk badly about them, etc. Email is sufficiently secure for most people when it comes to stuff like this, and that really has nothing to do with other risks, such as those caused by google "reading your email".

He also talks about the risk of google discontinuing gmail, which is pretty far fetched.

Here is the sort of real bad thing that can happen from google's practice, though: you talk about something "secret" in email, and then later, it shows you an incriminating advertisement while someone is looking over your shoulder. For instance, you might email someone asking for advice on a surprise trip to Paris for your wife, and then later (after carefully stashing those emails in folders), your wife sees on your screen all these ads for Paris hotels and airfare, and knows what you are up to.

My point is that, just because certain aspects of email communication is insecure doesn't mean we need to accept even more insecurity from our email provider.

The author also forgets to mention that the authorities have relatively easy access to people's email communications. Read http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/ to understand how troubling the American government's peaking into personal stuff is.

1. You are engaged in an email exchange concerning a sensitive topic.

2. Your email provider targets you with an ad based on information associated with that sensitive topic.

3. You click that ad.

4. The advertiser records your IP address. They know what ad campaign the ad you clicked was part of, and what demographic they targeted it to. So, now they know your IP address is associated with that demographic.

5. The advertiser sells their IP demographic data.

6. Others sell IP demographic data that ties your identity to the IP address.

Now someone who buys the right databases can end up knowing that there is a good chance you (by name/address or email address) is likely in a demographic associated with that sensitive topic.

The bottom line is that the data miners are very very clever. They can extract amazing data out of seemingly innocuous data leaks. Clicking a targeted ad is one such data leak.

Let me point out a few things:

- google says it analyzes gmail contents algorithmically, but do we really know what they actually do ? - email being made out of secure or insecure protocols is irrelevant to gmail respecting privacy - it is not about email security, it's about privacy. - secure email is not a myth, see gpg - one individual who could gain access to a mailbox is not the same order of magnitude than a transnational corporation systematically going through inboxes of milions of people. - "Google becomes evil and steals all your email to do X "is not on your list of plausible threats because it's worded wrong, try "Google goes through all your email and adds it to the info they have on you to build a very detailed profile of you and your life" which goes on the confirmed list along with "people have been locked out of the gmail accounts without a valid reason" - Google is obviously about selling ads [1] and has to maintain trust from their users for this to work, it does not mean they have to respect people privacy, actually it even means the opposite, they have to breach on people's privacy and make it look so it won't hurt their users' trust. - gmail has default https, sure, but only after a high profile case of hacked gmail accounts made it to the medias. [2]

Lastly, about the advice to never use @gmail.com addresses, I wonder if using our own domain would protect us from google having the abilty to lock us out of our inbox.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/microsoft-apple-and-google-wh... [2] http://www.physorg.com/news182629293.html

Even if they get your email encrypted they still have a map of all of your contacts.

You could run your own mail server, use PGP, disk encryption and suitably back it up using something like rsync or git. The above probably takes about the same time that the author took to write this article.

If you are concerned about contacts being traced there is Mixminion, an anonymous remailer.

I just finally realized, that by storing all my emails to some company server is potentially dangerous to my privacy. I just don't know, who can potentially access my data, now or in the future.

I switched to another solution, which is to periodically download my emails through pop3s to my local truecrypt-ed drive. It is a slightly more work, but not that much work. I just feel better not to have my private data with Google.

What bothers me most is that MS is trying to take this principled position on the side of the consumer when I know they would be doing the EXACT SAME THING if their ad platform and marketplace wasn't so far behind AdWords.

To my old colleagues at MS, please help stop these embarrassments from happening.

The "reading" analogy is FUD employed by competitors to scare the uninformed, HN community should know better.