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aralbalkan.com

260 pointsstephenc_c_85 comments

This argument is really vacuous and makes an inappropriate analogy.

First, we need to distinguish between attaching ads to the mail experience versus injecting them into the actual content. In the original post, this service would actually open these letters and insert ads into them. This is not even remotely comparable to what most email providers do. They insert ads around the service, but never actually alter the content of the email. A better analogy would be receiving a discount on branded stamps or allowing advertisements to be displayed on your mailbox.

Second, the use of the term "read" when discussing advertising is asinine, disingenuous and probably detrimental to the conversation (inasmuch as it can provoke unnecessary fear in non-technical users). "Read" implies active evaluation and comprehension, conceivably by a person. The GMail algorithm does not "read" email in the classical sense. It systematically evaluates the content in a way isn't even remotely comparable to "reading." (This doesn't mean that this sort of advertising isn't bad, but portraying it in the way he did is just unnecessary fear mongering.)

Third, the OP seems to decry "keeping a copy" as some sort of violation. GMail is a webmail service. What the fuck are they supposed to do if not store your mail?

Fourth, this service actually seems like a good idea, and is probably something I would use for various types of mail. The price of mail been steadily increasing, and I would be fine with these practices if I knew they were saving me money. I'm willing to tolerate advertising so long as I know that the service is improving my life. Like I do with 95% of the things I use.

In conclusion, this is a very dubious analogy that doesn't really contribute to the pragmatic discussion of cost versus privacy.

You're nitpicking, and doing it wrong.

Inserting ads on your mail client is not the problem, it's how they target the advertise. Of course they inserted it into the mail to make it clearer, but obviously it's not literal.

Keeping a copy for the user to see is different from keeping a copy so that they can do data analysis later so they can target the ads even more.

And he didn't even mention how they just show the NSA all your mail whenever they ask for it.

Not sure what's dubious about the analogy. Seems like you just read what you wanted to read.

You're making impertinent responses, and doing it wrong.

If there is a distinction between target and untargeted ads, it isn't being made through the insertion analogy. Invasiveness has nothing to do with specificity, and the shock value of the piece was clearly intended to come from the opening of the mail and inserting of the ads, not that the service "keeps profiles," which was just a brief aside in the post. Obviously, it's an analogy. Nothing about it is literal. However, analogies are supposed to bear resemblance to the real world, which this doesn't do and which is why it's detrimental to the discussion around these issues. That was my original point.

The OP clearly objects to relinquishing your data in general. He links to articles about "owning your own data" in the footer. I don't think this primarily about targeted ads. What if the post office opened and replicated every piece of mail that you sent or received, then kept it on file in case you needed it at some point. This eliminates any adverse reaction that might come from advertising while providing a valuable service. Do you think that the content of this post is condoning that? I'm not 100% sure of the OP's intentions, but this piece seems discourage relinquishing your data in general. It paints with an incredibly broad brush and fails to acknowledge the complexity of this issue. That is precisely why I don't like it.

If storing mail is bad even without ads simply because it makes you susceptible to surveillance, doesn't that validate the OP's point that storing of any kind is bad? I don't understand. Your arguments seem contradictory, and I suspect that you're making responses just to make them, not because they are constructive to the conversation. I'm not interested in a regressive conversation that is predicated on interpreting the intentions of a third party or engaging in a line-by-line debate that has strayed from the actual issue.

I'm not sure what's nitpicky about my post. Seems like you just read what you wanted to read.

> This is not even remotely comparable to what most email providers do. They insert ads around the service, but never actually alter the content of the email

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57594819-93/google-starts-p...

And how is this related to "altering the content of the email"?

I thought someone might bring this up. This still isn't comparable to altering the actual content of your mail. The ads, though displayed with all of your genuine mail, are still discreet items and are noninvasive. This type of advertising is quite similar classic snail mail, where junk mail is mixed in with regular mail.

I don't know why this still surprises people, or why Google is being singled out here. Information is transmitted by copying. Every provider has to look at and analyze your messages if they want to do clever things to them, like let you search your archived mail server-side. Even if they don't do anything with your messages themselves, they're still compelled by the government to parse through it all. Nothing is safe.

Whenever anyone asks me to explain how the Internet works, I don't talk about tubes or connected servers, because thinking your message is "in" a pipe is a broken abstraction; it makes people imagine nothing sees or touches your messages until they arrive at the destination. Instead, the mental model I encourage people to have for Internet is that "each packet is like a message stuck to a big public message board." Privacy is not the default; it's a public system, and privacy is something you have to actively create on top of it (via encryption, onion-routing, etc.)

Google is singled out due to the humans behind the corporate facade complying, no one forced them to.

I would hate to reduce it to binary but things like installation of proxy hardware (Blue Coat[1]) to monitor with or court orders for conscription of local hardware are. Without people collaborating along with the US government, then people... wouldn't be collaborating. Those within the USG would be forced towards alternative routes such as those detailed in the PRISM slides.

Bonus: Security creates insecurity, all this logging and data collection creates more data. This data, which Snowden's Booz Allen Hamilton has shown[2], can be leaked. As an example a look into the Blue Coat logs leaked[3] from Assad's Syria by extraordinary esoteric activists Telecomix[4] reveals followers of Christianity along with homosexuals intently monitored.

Bonus Caution: I wouldn't touch the Booz or HBGary leaks unless you like federal prosecution for assisting in dissemination of data on the profiteering collaborators[5].

[1] http://www.bluecoat.com/

[2] https://thepiratebay.sx/torrent/6533009/Military_Meltdown_Mo...

[3] http://bluesmote.com/

[4] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jul/07/telecomix-...

[5] http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-doj-is-suing-barrett-br...

you think the usg is actively pursuing these types of prosecutions?

I may have missed some clarifications, so I feel the need to ask:

Did the USG not force Google to comply with their demands, and also keep quiet about it? I know that was the initial story.

Or is the issue that Google went above and beyond the USG's requests?

My definition of force involves things like threats of violence, firearms. FORCE.

People's definition of force here on HN seems to be "A written request by the USG."

Once again, this is a fundamental mistake especially techies seem to make when it comes to privacy.

Privacy isn't about what is and what isn't publicly accessible, it's about what you do with that information.

It's a violation of privacy for any company to follow me around in a public space and record my movements.

It's a violation of privacy for a company to use the data I've given them for any other purpose than the reason for which I gave it to them, because it is still my data.

This is why collecting and collating wifi ssid's by Google was considered a violation of privacy. Yes, the data was out there, but the abuse of that data was a violation.

Privacy is not a technological system. Privacy is not about security.

People should be able to use the internet without automatically getting their privacy violated, just like they should be able to go out in public without having their privacy violated. The fact that it is an open system is absolutely no excuse for deliberate privacy violations.

Stop blaming the victims.

>People should be able to use the internet without automatically getting their privacy violated, just like they should be able to go out in public without having their privacy violated.

You do realize that that's exactly wrong. Going out into public means that you risk being followed. Being followed becomes illegal when they follow you into your home (a private space) or when they actually hurt you/have hurt you.

You are making an even more fundamental mistake: knowing that you're addressing people asking how to act in their day-to-day lives--and yet talking about morality and how other people "should" be treating them, instead of talking about actions and consequences, and what they must do to protect themselves.

To parallel your "blaming the victims" rhetoric: walking down the street late at night, will a sense of injustice protect me from a rapist? No; kickboxing classes and a gun will protect me from a rapist. The sense of injustice is for when I'm safe at home and can write a letter to my congressman.

In the moment where you are actually trying to protect a real secret, a sense of injustice that there are corporations and governments willing to pilfer your secrets will not keep your privacy. Encryption and anonymity will keep your privacy.

"Public places. It may sound obvious, but you have little to no privacy when you are in public. When you are in a public place your actions, movements, and conversations are knowingly exposed to the public. That means the police can follow you around in public and observe your activities, see what you are carrying or to whom you are talking, sit next to you or behind you and listen to your conversations — all without a warrant."

From the EFF https://ssd.eff.org/your-computer/govt/privacy

In my opinion, this kind of argument is demagoguery and ignores practical security concerns.

For the average person, which is more likely?

(1) A hacker taking over their email account to get bank info, etc.

(2) Some nebulous threat from Google having too much information about you.

Google and Gmail offer some of the best security controls and threat detection of any webmail provider that I've seen (pioneered two-factor authentication for email, warn you about strange sign-in activity on your account, allow you to kill other sessions, etc.).

If the outcome of this kind of article is people move to less secure email because of some intangible threat, I think it's a net harm. Gmail is still the best choice for my mom.

I wrote about this more than a year ago at greater length on my blog: http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/ and there's more discussion on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3582609

My point is that any post criticizing Gmail for it's business model should also consider what is realistically a problem in the actual world (hacking) and hopefully offer some advice on what to do about it. I'm not sure this kind of "Google reads all your email and it's terrible. Full stop." post is very helpful.

Ok, a couple more things to preempt the inevitable trolling:

(1) Government snooping is a separate issue, but as far as I know there are no major email providers that a non-technical person can use that aren't vulnerable. We sorely need easy-to-use, widely used email encryption. Google isn't likely to do this because it would be counter to their business model, and this _is_ a problem.

(2) I don't use Gmail myself, but not because they are algorithmically reading my email. I switched (to FastMail) because I don't like the design direction of the Gmail UX, the FastMail UX is substantially faster, and the support is better (i.e. it exists). However, given that the average webmail user (a) doesn't want to pay for email and (b) is going to use one of the most popular services by default, I still think Gmail is a good choice.

> Government snooping is a separate issue, but as far as I know there are no major email providers that a non-technical person can use that aren't vulnerable.

But at least, those other email providers are different that your web search provider - while if you use Gmail, your profile will also contain your searches (if you use Google for search), visits from those searches, and then also data from other Google services you choose to use.

If you're talking about government snooping, they most likely can aggregate information from different sources.

If you're talking about the nebulous "one company has all my information and may do something evil" argument, I still say that it doesn't matter. Email is by far the most sensitive thing most people do online, so if there was a real threat from a company having all that information, also having searches is not substantially worse.

Regardless, I still don't see a credible threat of harm from Google having this information that outweighs the actual threat of hacking.

Wow, that's a rant you wrote! We should use software that allows encrypting of sensible information on the client's side. That's it.

If they want show me ads - all right then, let me choose out of categories that I'm really interesting in(i.e. Android, Ruby, running, my favorite authors and tv-shows etc-etc). And I will click that links.

> Wow, that's a rant you wrote!

Thanks :) I'm tired of seeing this kind of post over and over again. At best it's misguided in that it's only telling half the story, at worst it's linkbait.

> We should use software that allows encrypting of sensible information on the client's side. That's it.

Well said. If you care about security, this is the answer. We really, really need good, ubiquitous email encryption software. Unfortunately it doesn't seem likely to be widely adopted anytime soon.

> If they want show me ads - all right then, let me choose out of categories that I'm really interesting in(i.e. Android, Ruby, running, my favorite authors and tv-shows etc-etc). And I will click that links.

The holy grail of online advertising is ads that provide value to the user. This is the model behind sponsors of nerdy podcasts (http://5by5.tv). The ads reads can actually be helpful. It's not easy to do with a user base as diverse as Gmail's, but I'm sure Google is trying.

I disagree with the premise that the large scale systematic privacy violations and surveillance by on the worlds most powerful corporations is the minor threat.

In my opinion, this is the greater threat to our society, and individual criminals compromising individual email accounts is just minor criminal activity, which has always existed in one form or the other.

I believe you mistake immediacy for relevance.

I think government surveillance is an issue because people can be arrested or harassed for things. I still don't see what harm can come from a private company having my data as long as they don't share it or use it for something nefarious. I don't see the threat of that happening with google.

To be clear these are two very separate issues: government surveillance and privacy policies of corporations.

We agree on the first point and disagree on the second.

If I'm wrong on the second, please give me a plausible example of something google would do with user data that would be actually harmful besides sharing with the government.

Big difference. We are the government and have at least the illusion of changing overreaching government policies (and the recent Obama speech shows that it is at least possible to get them to recognize that).

There is NOTHING we can do to change Google.

>Government snooping is a separate issue, but as far as I know there are no major email providers that a non-technical person can use that aren't vulnerable.

Not to mention, uh, snail mail is run on the government rails.

Machine "reading" the email != humans reading the same thing

A machine can't laugh at your embarrassing confession. Nor can a machine talk about your letter to its friends.

For either of these things to happen with gmail would require serious risk and effort on part of an employee.

It doesn't matter, the information is there. He mentions building a profile. While the machines might have built it, there's nothing stopping a real person (forced or otherwise) from browsing those profiles.

First of all, there are lots of things stopping them (systems permissions, checks, organizational rules, etc). All might be circumventable -- but to claim they don't exist is ridiculous.

Secondly, intent matters. Killing a person can be a pure accident, can be manslaughter, can be first degree premeditated murder. You might attempt to dumb it down to "It doesn't matter, the person is dead" -- but that isn't how the US legal system, or the majority of people think.

If the intent of a system is to allow the profiles to be read by people (or shipped to government) that is very different than if the intent it to be exclusively used by software.

"The information is there" on all e-mail providers. There is nothing (short of end-to-end encryption) stopping a real person at any e-mail provider from looking at your email.

The interesting distinction (for me, and I have been a happy GMail "customer" for close to a decade soon) isn't the profile, it's the human. I have strong faith that Google can be successful in keeping humans from reading my e-mail (or a computer-generated digest of it, which is what the profile amounts to), and so I don't worry about the existence of the profile.

Not always. Several new security-oriented email providers boast diskless email servers and end-to-end encryption.

Yes, end-to-end encryption would fix all this, but it would also fix it in OP's satirical mail service, as well as in GMail - so that's really a tangential point.

Trusting that those providers don't start siphoning off a copy of your mail (or are indeed diskless and not out of malice or incompetence actually just using regular disks. Also, being diskless is worthless if they are still keeping your mail around in memory anyway) is no different than trusting Google to keep humans away from my email.

> Machine "reading" the email != humans reading the same thing

Try saying that in any of the gajillion PRISM threads.

Machine "reading" the email to glean useful advertising data != machine "reading" the email to find any excuse to label you a terrorist.

> machine "reading" the email to find any excuse to label you a terrorist

Is there any evidence at all that this is happening? So far They don't need to do that, they use corrupt informants (Guantanomo) or stupid videos on YouTube (US teen "rappers").

Yes, there is. [1]

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/05...

Why would you think they would hire a human to read mails? As I understand you submit your message online, they analyze your message the same way emails are analyzed, then they print the letter along with some ads and puts it in letter. Hiring people to read the letters would be extremely inefficient.

It had already happened: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/google-spy/

Google acknowledged Wednesday that two employees have been terminated after being caught in separate incidents allegedly spying on user e-mails and chats.

David Barksdale, 27, was fired in July after he reportedly accessed the communications of at least four minors with Google accounts, spying on Google Voice call logs, chat transcripts and contact lists, according to Gawker, which broke the story Wednesday.

Google has acknowledged that it fired Barksdale for violating company privacy policy, and acknowledged that it was the second such incident of its kind at the company.

>A machine can't laugh at your embarrassing confession. Nor can a machine talk about your letter to its friends.

To its friends at the NSA? I beg to differ.

That's completely not the intent of the quoted text and you know it. There's certain implications with that phrase. Blindly sending data != talk about your letter to its friends.

So... Can I still get the free snail mail for life? I don't have a twitter account, and I'm not going to register one just to get free snail mail for life...

I hope that you can afford the postage, as I intend to embark on a mega mass mail campaign for a few dozen different customers, and the thought of free postage is quite enticing...

What if Schnail Mail automatically filtered postal junk mail so you never had to receive another piece again?

What if it let you search the contents of every printed message you'd ever sent or received?

What if it let you send international mail, with attachments, for free?

What if it protected you and more susceptible friends and family from postal scams?

What if it informed you that your recipient no longer existed at the address you used?

What if it let you undo sending of mail you regret writing?

...

A free postal mail service that truly replicated Gmail's functionality would probably appeal to many, even with inserted ('relevant') ads and all the privacy issues.

Paid versions of such a service already exist (e.g. https://www.earthclassmail.com/ ). A free equivalent could be pretty disruptive.

Most of these features are available even if you don't use Gmail though - the article's point wasn't about e-mail in general, just the invasiveness of Gmail.

My point was that people who use Gmail get more than a free mail service in return for their privacy.

The things that Gmail does best – search, spam filtering, scam warnings, simple attachments, innovative labs features like undo send – weren't offered by Schnail Mail, which invited you to trade your privacy for free postal mail alone.

Trading privacy for free mail alone would have little appeal to most. But Gmail offers more than that. A feature-matched physical mail equivalent to Gmail would make an ad-supported postal mail service far more compelling.

I suspect you'd also see more hands stay raised if you flipped the pitch to place the negatives up front ahead of a long list of potential benefits.

This is just a re-hash of Microsoft's Scroogled campaign (http://www.scroogled.com). Just as with scroogled, the comparison of a human reading your mail with a machine analysing the contents in order to provide focussed advertising results in a complete loss of credibility.

Why does putting a human in the loop change anything? Either way, my data is being used on behalf of other people.

Because machines don't care what you do, or who you are. Humans potentially do. They can gossip about you, they can read, and understand, all your private emails and use that information against you.

Humans are slow. Gmail's computers are programmed to wring the most possible profit out of millions and millions of accounts. Seriously, I'm convinced the humans would do less damage.

I'm convinced of the opposite: humans judge basing on incomplete and incorrect data, they are often malicious and selfish and blinded by personal gain.

Computers don't have prejudices, don't have a motive, and work on the specific task without being sidetracked by feelings.

Computers follow instructions of the programmers. If the programmer is good, the computer has the same prejudices. Specifically, if the programmer wants to find juicy gossip, a computer lets her do it faster. If the programmer respects users' privacy, so will the computer. (If she's not good, the computer has random prejudices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_koan#Uncarved_block)

I partly disagree for the following reasons:

1) If the programmer is good the computer COULD show prejudices. It's not an implication. I can be a racist bigot, but if I'm a good programmer I will not prevent login for the users 晴輝, Abd al-Aziz or 湘. I can build a watermill and it will not have prejudice, it will just do a job.

2) The programs running in such big companies are peer reviewed, so the inner workings are known and checked by at least two people. You cannot do that to human beings. You don't know what they are ultimately trying to do AND you cannot have at least two people checking on them. If now you're thinking of parents, remember that they have a limited influence on a person.

3) Random prejudice could still work, just like random noise, but I still disagree on the prejudice part.

> I can be a racist bigot, but if I'm a good programmer I will not prevent login for the users 晴輝, Abd al-Aziz or 湘.

However, if you were a programmer with a very insular mindset, you could create a system without support for such non English names, by not even considering that non English users would use the service. Just an example of a prejudice that could show though.

True, but by definition a good programmer should take non English names into account. ;-)

It is more an example of random prejudice introduced by a programmer. In that case I retract some of my points.

Because those machines create a profile of you the likes of which the NSA would have a wet dream over.

That profile can and will be used however Google wants' to use it.

Remember, Google's (the company's) only reason for existence is to make a profit, and ALL their revenues come from Advertising - 96 percent.

That's a hell of an incentive to know as much about you as possible, and use that against you to violate your privacy and abuse your eyeballs (sorry for the semantics, I know).

The problem with email is that we've arrived at a monoculture. TLS-enabled email is pretty secure if nobody can compromise either of the two ends (or, well, the intermediaries). Since everyone uses Gmail, it's trivial to just get everyone's email, since one of the two ends is pretty much guaranteed to be there.

If we move to a system where everyone has their own mail server, or at least one mail server for a few people, that system will be much harder to snoop on.

If a system evolved where a significant proportion of communications were difficult for the security services to monitor, encryption would be criminalized and it's users vilified as unpatriotic.

Great. Let's cross that bridge when we come to it.

Why do you care about that, we all know that because we all sin, God will all send us to hell for eternity. That hypothetical situation is much more awful than your hypothetical situation!

The analogy is a bit leaky IMHO. Gmail doesn't add advertisements to the mails you are sending out. They only add ads to the messages you received and are looking at in your browser. If you don't want to see any ads, just use an IMAP client and you'll get the original message.

In-fact, not altering the mails their users are sending was one of the unique features when gmail launched. AFAIR both Hotmail and Yahoo were altering the messages of their users to include ads.

The part about reading the mail is true though, but on the other hand: Unless you host your own email server, it is absolutely impossible to be sure that nobody is going to read your mail as it is stored on the mailbox server (it also can (and is as we now know) be read in transit most of the time and outside of your control).

As such, I honestly trust Google more than I trust $ISP. Usually $ISP is equal to $CARRIER and those, IMHO, are the personified evil, so I wouldn't trust them at all. But even $ISP != $CARRIER, I still think that the bigger the mail provider company, the safer your messages probably are there (minus government spying, but that works regardless of ISP): Bigger providers are bigger targets and thus have likely invested more in data security and internal procedures to make sure mail isn't being read by humans unless strictly needed.

If you don't want ads in your Google-served email while using the web interface, get a paid Google Apps Account. No ads, very flexible email routing and actual customer support. For $50 per year per user. That doesn't say anything about the data being used for other marketing purposes of course, but, as I said, that problem is the same everywhere unless you self-host (which is reasonably complicated and annoying to do).

TBH when I was running a free email service in the early 2000s I really had to fight the temptation to just run grep over /var/mail and have some fun. I think the smaller the company (it was just me and my colleague back then), the bigger the risk that one unethical person can do serious damage.

The article is a bit demagogic, because saying "we open your letters" is not the same thing as "Google algorithm reads your email."

I don't defend Google here, and I also stopped using Gmail, but not for the reasons mentioned in the article. Storing the emails and mechanically parsing them wouldn't be a problem for me, if they could ensure that those emails will not leak out of Google - but that is not technically nor legally possible (at least nowadays).

I didn't realize this was satire until I saw the Google logo, and I thought it was an awesome idea. "Oh, just like Gmail, but they're really open and honest about it."

I guess the reason Google and the like have to conceal their intentions is because there seem to be few people (three out of an audience in the example) who are willing to go into it knowing the terms (or admit to be willing). A lot more people are happy with signing up for the service not stopping to consider why a corporations would be so charitable, then finding out and joining the outrage bandwagon [while continuing to use the service].

This pattern seems insincere or dishonest (for the most part, always exceptions, etc), and I'm hoping it's a fad that dies out, as opposed to the value proposition getting bashed to death. Every other week there's a great tutorial on how to switch to duck duck go and roll your own everything, those are the honest sincere solutions for the truly interested.

Why would that pattern disappear? It makes money... What I would like to disappear is naivety of people. They should understands what they actually are doing. They don't need to understands the technology, just that free doesn't exist. Personally I don't care, it's a small price to pay to get a good spam protection, a good security and a good interface accessible everywhere.

To clarify, I meant the pattern of acting outraged while continuing to use the accused service. We're on the same page.

This is a far better mockery/attack on Google's strategy than Microsoft's Scroogle campaign ever was. They should learn from this. I especially loved the cute & funny one-liners.

(Not that I support Scroogle, it's a cheap shot. I hate negative marketing. It's setting a bad example in tech, which has mostly kept the negative marketing away.)

I like the way this has been presented, but have to admit that I disagree with the point - if someone's willing to give me something for free (monetary) in exchange for reading info I pass through their services I'm fine with that - I just won't use their service to send anything I don't want them to read. There are good arguments for privacy, and for people/organisations being open about how they use any personal data they collect, but in this scenario you've willingly and knowingly signed up to a contract; and in doing so invalidated your right to be upset by the required "payment method" of information.

What happens if I put a sealed envelope inside the schnail mail envelope? Is that opened too?

Anyone who has ever Googled their name and hometown must realize how much information is being sold about us. Google is just presenting the top layer, but this problem is a very old one. For better or worse, I think we have to get used to a post-privacy society. If it forces us to be more tolerant of each other's imperfections (because our own are shared with the world) all the better.

Knowing in advance that the intent is to read my mail feels icky and invasive. Google did not start out reading our mail; their approach was a classic case of the slow-boiled toad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog).

Perhaps you should gain users confidence and trust first by NOT reading their mail and giving them an opportunity to become reliant on the service. At less than 0.50 per piece, postal mail is not so expensive that it weights a risk/benefit analysis in your favor with this model. Most people would probably opt to just continue paying for their mail versus having it read. (Also, not sure people want to create bad friend karma -- ha! -- by having their friends spammed with "junk" mail.)

Moving from critiquing to finding a more viable option: I think you can still make money with this upfront by "skinning" the mail with fully printed ad envelopes (obviously with windows for the addresses to show) paid for by general consumer advertisers who don't have as much of a need for making sure they are hitting a niche group.

Once, and if, you gain a critical mass of users then you could introduce the "read" option with some kind of incentive to get people to opt-in. At least they will trust you more by that time, theoretically. And you could then sign up more advertisers including niche marketers.

The current model is not palatable -- unless it were used by a small business/entrepreneur that is sending marketing mail and therefore does not care if it is read (but that then poses a problem of them potentially having a competitor's materials inserted with their materials). If the model remains as is I would have to say #schnailmailfail.

-Felicia Joy @feliciajoy

I was disappointed that it isn't real. This would have been a great way to keep in touch with prisoners, whose mail is being read anyways. It would have been nice to type letters without needing to print them out and mail it, and "free" sealed the deal.

This is the guy that did an expenses paid tech talk where one of the big sponsors is heavily involved in the gambling industry, and then proceeded to publicly bitch out another speaker for doing a talk on technical hurdles of some kind of sports betting platform because betting companies are evil. Can't really have any less respect for someones opinion or thoughts when they are so ill-mannered and hypocritical.

Seems like it could be argued both the gag, Schnail Mail, and the real gmail are fairly upfront in the relationship with the user. Advertising is present. Obviously, some technical differences but it IS disclosed!

Is this kind of like - http://www.promotinglinux.com/truth/ (just for fun)

Or is this supposed to be a sarcastic poke at gmail, the NSA, etc?

Funny, but for extra laughs they should add a section on PRISM: We keep scanned copies of all your snail mail indefinitely, which the NSA can access through our PRISM backdoor on a moments notice. ;)

I don't think they would be allowed to acknowledge that.

Google could offer a $20/month no-ads no-tracking email service. How many privacy conscious people are willing to pay that? Its not Google deciding to do this, its just ourselves.

Exactly zero privacy conscious people would trust Google for that service.

Which is probably true but I can't tell if that says more about paranoia or Google.

I would pay for that.

Although I don't trust Google on privacy, this deal would benefit me - I get to take away the worst aspects of Gmail while keeping the better aspects.

However, I wonder if offering this service as an option would generally drive people away from free-Gmail: it would serve as an direct admission and reminder that ads and tracking are not really desirable.

Google does offer a $5/month no-ads email service called Google Apps.

According to their homepage, 5 million businesses have chosen that.

http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/

No tracking is trickier, who would believe Google (or any business) if they claimed they didn't track their customers? The lack of ads you can verify for yourself.

No ads is already free. Just you IMPAP or POP3. You are still tracked, but there are no ads.

Yes, but that's not an option for personal email.

I might pay not to be tracked, but I certainly wouldn't pay anything approaching $20 per month.

http://www.bonkersworld.net/google-reads-your-email/?

Give me Adblock for Reality and I might think about it.

http://chromeadblock.com/freedom/

Took me a couple moments to figure out this was a joke.

Disrupting postal services industry! Liked the idea. Except its name starting with 'sch' :/

wonderful explanation

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