Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewljohnson | Hacker News Reader

Google should invent a distributed, encrypted email protocol and make that network an option in GMail for storage and message sending. That would be a great PR move - if there is no central server, and no central message pipe, it's a little hard for anyone to think Google wants to be complicit in spying.

View on HN

How would you implement a secure web interface to distributed encrypted storage? The moment a user wants to view email in their browser, it needs to be decrypted by Google's server (or decrypted by Javscript served from Google's server, which is equivalent from a security perspective).

For users who are willing to give up the web interface, there are many open-source email clients that provide strong encryption (e.g. Thunderbird + GPG).

The web is simply not designed with privacy in mind. People should stop using webmail.

What a truly, truly, truly absurd statement. I run my own webserver and have Roundcube exposed. It's only accessible via my VPN and even then, it's HTTPS. So tell me, how are you planning to compromise that?

In fairness, if it's only accessible via VPN then your Roundcube instance is not part of the web.

That would be the antithesis of what Google does - they give away services for free in exchange for access to personal information that they use to sell more precise targeting to advertisers.

Google's business relies on them being able to examine your personal data. That's how Gmail is paid for.

Perhaps someone who has a different business model e.g. Samsung, Microsoft, or Apple should do this.

Google already offers paid email accounts that don't show ads.

But those are no more private than the unpaid ones. And they can still extract value by profiling you from your email and then displaying ads on search and other properties based on what they learn about you.

There already is a distributed, encrypted email protocol. That's what gmail uses.

Trusting "someone" on a distributed network to store information for you long term isn't a good idea. They disappear and your data is gone too.

Also, if you can find them to request the data, a search warrant can find them to request it, too.

Also, crypto doesn't help. It would be foolish to assume gmail messages aren't encrypted on disk. The keys have to be stored somewhere. End users can't and won't securely store key material. Store them on the server, and it's subject to the warrant.

That wouldn't be Gmail in any sense. Why would google be involved in that product -- they dont' provide the server, the delivery, the spam detection (right?)

If you dont want to use Gmail for some or all messages, just don't use Gmail.

They could provide all the client software. Hell, they could even make ad targeting work by moving their mail-reading bots to the client and have them select ads from a stack of mothership-provided ads, with no feedback except following the link if you click.

But I agree with you that it's very different from anything they do. Also, too vulnerable to piracy or cloning. Aaand it may not be feasible to run their bots in a weak machine.

> they could even make ad targeting work by moving their mail-reading bots to the client

Gmail ad targeting isn't a bit of JavaScript that can run in real time in the background. It's a series of huge map reduces touching data sets larger than any client computer could store. Just indexing a pre-prepared list of mothership ads would result in a horrible user experience (far poorer ad targeting).

Google has a vested interest in only showing you ads you might be interested in; it doesn't work as well as it should, but it works magnitudes better than the state of the art 10 years ago.

Why would anyone use a proprietary ad-ridden client when there would be multiple high-quality open-source clients available?

And if the protocol is sufficiently closed to prevent open-source clients, why would anyone use it at all? Wouldn't that be the same as the XMPP->Hangouts transition that infuriated everyone a few weeks ago?

Not counting monetization, the main difficulty with implementing true privacy - from the provider itself - of web services is the necessity to cut the "account recovery" feature.

When the provider can't access your data, if you lose your password, all of your data is gone forever. If you are willing to live with that, alternatives already exist, as others pointed out.

Expect that Google wants to read what you wrote on the email and to whom. Of course to help you see more ads, er better ads. Cause you're just dying for another dozen ads.

Imagine a Google Glass wearer and a NSA order to record everything he sees?

Well, it would be possible to make the ad-thing part of displaying the message. That's the moment when you have to decrypt it anyhow.

That's how it works now. It would be foolish to assume that your emails are stored on disk unencrypted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com