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Comment by knowaveragejoe | Hacker News Reader

His method of hiding his activity was saving drafts in gmail... roughly on par with what I'd expect most people to do to maintain "privacy".

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Errr, I've read that's a standard tactic nowadays. You write and save drafts, and the other person logs into the account and reads them. No email servers are touched, it's supposed to be a good method ... unless of course an IP address is compromised. As mentioned, once they started looking, they correlated the IP addresses and times with her hotel stays.

Yes, I read that somewhere as well. It is still a bad tactic.

At first you would want to encrypt the information. Then you would like to have some method of transfer that does not stick out and could hide the intent to transfer encrypted data. Perhaps with the help of some steganography tool. And you would make sure that nobody identifies you in the process by using tools like Tor. This "I hope they don't notice" method is just gambling.

Agreed, the "saving as draft" method is more hiding in plain site than anything. It doesn't protect the content of the data, and if you're not paying attention it's easy for someone to see who's been accessing the data. It's more a defense against people that aren't really looking that hard.

Well, it might be a good method of keeping the readers identities Anonymous(provided they use Tor or a VPN to connect). But "saving a draft" is definitely keeping a copy on Google's servers, an interested party would have no trouble getting their hands on the content.

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