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Comment by specialp | Hacker News Reader

Google is not mining all networks for cleartext email. They are mining gmail which they have control of the "end". This is a huge advantage for Google as ISPs are starting to offer ability to advertise to end users by mining traffic.

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"End-to-end" implies that Gmail won't be able to read your emails. That means that this software and Gmail, one of Google's largest products, are going to be competing. One of them needs to adapt or die: if this software isn't backdoored or vulnerable right now, it will either be shuttered, backdoored or made vulnerable in the future. (Certainly Gmail is of tangible, financial good to them: it's more likely for them to favor it over End-to-End, which is a non-profit and humanitarian effort.)

Sure using this will just send a bunch of gibberish to Gmail in the body such that Gmail won't be able to auto-scan for ad keywords to send to you. But this probably will be used by .000001% of Gmail users, so I doubt they are worried about this affecting their business in any meaningful way.

And, even among those people who do use it, a big percentage of their email will remain unencrypted. Transactional email like flight or hotel booking confirmations sent from the airline or hotel. I have to think that's the valuable stuff to Google in terms of selling ads, not the topics you would choose to encrypt.

So the downside to them is not that big. And it's offset by the upside of user trust and confidence being maintained, or at least eroding less.

Well, they could just serve privacy ads to people who were encrypting their communication.

Heh, that's actually a neat idea. The profile of people which regularly send/receive encrypted email is basically geeks right now. Key off of the "-----BEGIN PGP ENCRYPTED MESSAGE-----" bit.

Yeah. Honestly, I think that if you know that someone encrypts their messages, you probably know a lot more about them then most other data points reveal.

It would also get Google a lot of street cred for being a privacy centric business.

My only problem is, I just don't see how you can scale the Chromebook software stack to a privacy centric business. I can't imagine trying to secure PGP keys on a Chromebook. But I haven't used one since the early beta models, so others may have more informed opinions,.

Or offer to let me pay for Gmail in lieu of scanning my email. Seriously Google, take my money.

You may want to find another email provider with a different business model.

Advertise tinfoil?

Someone else pointed out that subject lines will not be encrypted.

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