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On The Privacy Subtleties Of GMail, Other Webmail
Brad Templeton writes "After talking with Google folks and learning about E-mail privacy law from EFF (join!) lawyers, I have written a new essay on the privacy subtleties of GMail and other advanced webmail applications. Some of the fear has been overdone, but there are surprising issues due to the fact that the ECPA, written almost 20 years ago, wasn't prepared for fancy e-mail offerings like GMail. I issue a call for Google to encrypt your mail to avoid these issues."
Homophobia, non?
You need the secret decoder ring.
"I issue a call for Google to encrypt your mail to avoid these issues"
No... I have a better idea, instead of getting the government involved if you don't like it then you can choose to use a email service more to your liking.
Me? I can't wait to use Gmail, and if I don't like it then I will stop using it. See how simple it is?
This article goes right to the heart of my query. Rather, the existence of this article does so. Is a geek one who revels in technology and the pursuit of coolness in new technology? Or is a geek someone who is wrapped up in figuring out how technology will be used inherently for evil purposes?
I like to think of geeks as the happy lot who wander the streets of Akihabara mesmerized by all the glitz and blinkenlights of the latest and greatest devices.
The article demonstrates a new strain of geeks which seems to revel in stymieng the technological process by handicapping it at every turn.
I imagine that any geek can encompass both forms, but I have a feeling that lately it is the boys who cry wolf that are taking over geekdom.
I have been pwned because my
This is pretty rediculous if you ask me. People in America give away their privacy rights all the time, without any worry. Most of the YRO stories on slashdot are just about that. But when a half respectable company like google decides to provide a free service, which you aren't obligated to use people go crazy.
I don't understand it. If you can't handle an automated script putting some ads in your emails from a simple world relation algorithm, maybe you should just, not use it?
Nobody raised this size of a ruckus over Orkut's similar cookie features, especially considering they hold a far larger quantity of personal information than GMail ever will.
--
The last digit of pi is four.
In other words, no more than they know if you click on a Google sponsored link right now.
So, umm, in that case, don't sign up for a free trial of Out if you don't want one? *shrug*
Honestly, MSN, Yahoo & co. can do all of this right now, should they desire, and they have very little incentive to tell us about it. Well, maybe in the UK it might be illegal, but if they exclude all people who are from it from the policy and never tell anyone... (as if that were meaningful considering how many fill in utterly false info there...)
Hell, look at this current snip from the MSN Privacy Policy, which governs Hotmail:
Where was this fuss over these terms? I at least trust Google more than MSN...
What is all this fuss about?
People have been using webmail for years, and from what I've seen, it's become a great percentage of the email going back and forth. People leave a fairly good bit of mail there, going back pretty far if it's all text. The amount of space allocated has increased over time, which means they're being used... commonly... more and more as standard mail archives rather than just quickie anonymous email services.
All Google is doing is taking what people have already been doing, including many of the people on here, and expanding it beyond any reasonable sense of proportion.
And it will work. Because geeks love proportional reasonability failures.
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
Tackiness aside, though, if there are privacy problems, they need to be addressed. Yes, I know that Gmail is the ultimate in "opt-in." Don't like it, don't use it. This should make privacy concerns a moot point: interesting to debate, but nothing to fume about.
But google is a huge service. If Gmail is launched, people will flock to it in droves. Not just geeks, but ordinary people who have no idea how much of their private lives are lived "in plaintext." The privacy of many, many people, even those who do not use Gmail, is at stake.
Imagine, for example, a phone company that halves your rates in exchange for being allowed to sell transcripts of your phone conversations. Don't like it, don't use it -- but what about my rights to privacy when I call you? The simple answer ("don't call people with NoPrivacyPhone") is no solution at all.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
Its not like email is "secure" or private anyway (at least here in the UK) remember RIP? I know that the government getting hold of your email is different to some random (evil) company getting it, but if you need security you would be using PGP anyway. Considering the way we are monitored and tracked already I doubt this would make much difference. People should know that on the net you don't get something for nothing and 1gig is quite a lot even today IMO.
...but I don't like the idea of any company having gigabytes of my email, which it has conveniently filled with advertising
A person's email archive belongs on their own hard disk. I wouldn't trust all my personal mail to a 3rd party (even if it was a highly accessibly safe box).
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I'd say there's no laws to protect you there, seeing that it's *their* home directory, you just rent it out. And certainly in their TOS somewhere, they'd mention that fact.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Learn how to cryptographically sign your mail in Panther
The problem with Google encrypting email is that Google, Inc is a global corporation, with translations into over 20 languages. While the US export regulations regarding cryptography have been relaxed somewhat, these laws are different in every region. I spent some time as a paralegal, and I'd estimate that the kind of research required to roll out large scale global encryption on this scale would take many, many months at a minimum and cost well into the millions of dollars.
I doubt your privacy is worth that much to big old Google.
Such a mild invasion of privacy is the price you pay for free email with massive storage. To those who balk at the terms: how much would you shell out for a "secure" GMail?
I do not see any privicy issues if a program reads my email in a single pass and add ads as soon as it does not store the data, does not integrate and post-analyze the data, does not use the data for profiling, etc. Plus, you do not have to use gmail at all. However, if gmail raises privicy issues then what about anti-spam programs that read and analyze your email whether you want or not? Morever you do not even know if there is an anti-spam program when you send your email to foo@bar.net. Then what about censorship issues with anti-spam programs? If someone sends an offer for viagra to president@whitehouse.gov, and an anti-spam program stops it, is it an instance of anti-Consitutional censorship? I do not say that anti-Spam progams are evil but rather just making a point about to harsh fear of the beast that was not even born yet (officially).
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
Is how everyone's reactions would be different if this was Microsoft doing this?
"1gb email! They're just trying to corner the market and force all the other webmail companies out of business!"
"They can read your mail?! They're probably selling it to some clandestine government agency!" (at which point michael would pop up and post a link to his favorite article on the government buying large ram disks)
My point is, I wonder how much leeway Google is being given simply because they use linux and are a good search engine.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
I know others have said it, but really, if people don't like it they don't have to use it. Nobody is being forced in the least. There are plenty of other free email providers. The big comeback to that so far has been, "but what if I have to send an email to someone on GMail". You can't pick the phone service provider for a person you call, just like you can't pick a person's email provider for them. If you are that paranoid and whatever you are sending needs to be soooo private, then I doubt you'll want to be sending to a free email address of any kind anyway. I swear, some people just bitch to hear themsevles bitch.
But in the time I've been idly following this issue, it seems to me that the whole conflagration is over one small mention that your emails may last forever in their system even if you delete them.
Now , when first reading that, I just assume that this is standard ass-covering legal boilerplate. Stuff that conveys to the user," hey, you might have deleted it, and we might have deleted it, but, you know, *somewhere* on a partition of one of our many cluster machines, there *might* be a copy of your email that possibly could be read with forensic tools, so don't sue us in the unlikely event of this happening."
Is this the case? Is there more of an issue here?
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Because we keep back-up copies of data for the purposes of recovery from errors or system failure, residual copies of email may remain on our systems for some time, even after you have deleted messages from your mailbox or after the termination of your account.
How is this any different from what all other email providers do? As they make backups, generally it gets stored to tape. Later on, you stroll through and delete it. It still exists on the tape.
When you are logged into your Gmail account, Google will display targeted ads and other relevant information based on the content of the email displayed.
How is this different from what Yahoo does? Targeted ads based on search entries.
Oh wait...Google is honest enough to tell us up front.
(a) (1) Except as provided in paragraph (2), a provider of e-mail or instant messaging services to California customers may not review, examine, or otherwise evaluate the content of a customer's outgoing or incoming e-mail or instant messages, unless that provider has a court order or is otherwise required by law to do so.
She is trying to outlaw gmail, though I think it also makes other things illegal. I don't know how google or others can index email unless they "review, examine, or otherwise evaluate the content". What other features does this make illegal? (spam is specifically exempted)
From the article:
"My e-mail contains the story of my life, and what's not in there is often recorded in my searches. "
I've often wondered what someone could piece together from just reading my e-mail. Add the information on what I search on, and wow. My first reaction to this statement was that you couldn't really tell *that* much from email alone...but then I started to really condsider how much more a statement like that becomes truth as we become more and more dependent on things like email- Some guy who works on your pipes may not have needed a net presence/email system in the past, but even 'non-tech' type professions are going to REQUIRE e-mail access/web search access...which in turn means that the privacy issues being brought up are problems in infancy; they will grow with us.
I don't see requiring Google to encrypt email as the answer...infact the gut reaction by most people will be that Gmail is not really that different than Yahoo, MSN, etc...the fact that Gmail is going to be free is great, and I'm looking forward to using it...anything that I'm overly worried about I'll encrypt myself.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
Yes, I have read the article. Have the moderators? I think not!
To quote from the article (to save the moderators from actually having to read it): "The most obvious step Google could take would be to encrypt a user's e-mail, searching index and other associated data, so it can only be accessed using the user's password, and of course that password should not be stored when an e-mail session is over."
Nowhere in this quote does it say or imply that the government is involved with this encryption. In short, this is merely a call to Google to encrypt your email. Voluntarily. Without resort to government coercion to force them to.
Please read the article. Then read the post I replied to. Then read my reply. You will see that it is completely apropos and on topic.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Maybe I'm missing something too, but as others have pointed out (or will soon point out):
1. I don't own Google and none of you do either.
2. What Google do is their business, not ours.
3. What we do is our business, and we can opt to not use a Gmail account.
4. I can't see what kind of retard would want or need a GB for email no one ever looks at anyway. I like the storage but I would never use it for email - forget it, just forget it.
5. The same people who think this is not only cool but necessary are probably those that thought Expose was a new operating system - all because they're not capable of managing their own work.
6. There are lots of big companies who market excellent mass storage technologies. You'd probably be better off and with a more secure solution with them.
7. I'd be an idiot to entrust my email to a company like Google. They're going to let me search for my own email. Gee, but what exactly stands between my email and anyone else's search?
8. I really don't see the marketing point in it - from Google's standpoint. I like them but I fail to see how this is going to help them.
9. Most of what you'll read between now and Gmail is talking head tripe written by wannabes who want to get some e-zine real estate and have no better way to do it. All privacy concerns considered, it's the same old mish-mosh all over again, and frankly I think it's a shameful bore.
The anti-spam and anti-virus scripts already parse all of your mail. This is simply a different bit of parsing.
Also Google can and most likely will, due to the outcry as well as their own code of ethics, limit how much an advertiser can infer from what ad you clicked.
Ideally, it would be no more than anyone gives away by clicking ads in the search results (and I note that you need never click these ads if you don't want to...). This is something no one had a problem with before, after all, however much it told them about your searches (and we all should know by now that every single worthwhile log parsing scripts pulls out the keywords people visit your site via... right?).
Honestly, I'm more worried about the warrantless search provisions and such this could fall prey to. Even so, I trust Google far more than the other services which are undoubtably now copying them for this.
Honestly, I'd almost like them to patent a few provisions of this (provided the patent was narrow enough) and simply keep others from copying Google and doing the whole service badly, in a way that would be horrible from a privacy standpoint...
"I issue a call for Google to encrypt your mail to avoid these issues"
I though GMail was supposed to index your mail to make it searchable.
How will this work with encryption?
You would reduce GMAIL from "1G of emailsindexed by the internet's most popular search engine" to "1G of offline storage"
If you don't trust Google to keep your email private, why should you trust them to encrypt your email without using an escrow key or some equivalent?
I'll be using Gmail as soon as it launches, and my privacy will be Ok. How? Because whenever I have an important e-mail communication, it is encrypted.
./ has stated the obvious. We are technical people. We don't fear encryption. So why are we worrying? What am I missing?
So what is the problem? Do you think Google will try to break the encryption of random Gmail users?
Ah. Now I remember. People are lazy and fear technology, so they won't use encryption with Gmail. Then don't use email at all! Even if your email is handled by yor ISP, instead of a webmail service, any network admin at your ISP can read it.
What surprises me is that no-one on
Google is now giving Gmail accounts to active users of its blogger.com service. As seen here (Ev, of Blogger)
Current use of encryption for email is terribly low: I remember when Whitfield Diffie was asked at a Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference a few years back how many emails sent to him were encrypted. Because you'd expect him to be way up at the top of the list of people who get encrypted email... under 10% was his reply. Oh, and Zimmerman was also in the audience... same answer.
gmail would be parsing private emails that are sent to your email address and targeting ads to you based on the keywords it selects.
Um, if you're so worried about it, why don't you just keep using a pop client? That's what I'm doing, and I've got *much* more than 1GB of storage for my email. I've also got plenty of tools to search my email with (grep comes immediately to mind) when I want to search it, and I don't think Google can search my email *that* much better than I can already. I've got context in my head that Google doesn't have, and all I need is tools to narrow down possibilities.
The real question is, what value does GMail add that I don't already have on my system? The answer, so far, is not much, if any. And any advertisements they add greatly detracts from the overall value of the service to me.
If they're already engaging in proper disclosure of what they're doing, I'd like them to add something that shows what a referer field in your http header will look like when you *do* click a context-based ad in your inbox, along with a regular referer that would be shown when you click on ad on their adsense pages and their adwords.
People don't understand how much information is already being transmitted by http, and I'd like to see more of that being shown as part of 'proper disclosure'. But other than that, I don't see how Google's service is so great.
Like what I said? You might like my music
Why? So he can see that his email is telling him to... drink more Ovaltine!?! :)
Ah am not a crook! (\(-__-)/)
Don't use it.
It's not like they will be reading your email. It should come as no surprise to privacy advocates that email servers store email, parsing through it every step of the way. It doesn't matter because it's a black box operation. What their web server does with it, like selecting ads more appropriate to my interests, doesn't offend me at all as long as my email doesn't appear before human eyes other than my own.
What should worry privacy advocates is that their email is never encrypted unless they do so manually. It goes across the internet as plain text, and can readily scanned and logged by anyone who wants along the way, like spammers, identity theifs, the government, etc. Most likely your password isn't even encrypted. If you use wireless, most likely that isn't encrypted either. The least of your privacy worries should be GMail deciding that you're interested in enlargement pills and home loans.
Someone should be wacked over the head with a clue bat. It seems to me, that the core issue here is, that someone (this "someone" being a script) is reading eveybodys mail.
Well... what the heck do they think Baysean filters does? A lot (most) of email providers offers spam filtering including Baysean filter. Guess what - they read your email! - in the same way that gmail does.
Sheesh.
Underholdning.info
This could be changed. Technologies have gone from public (non-private) to private and protected before. Consider the switch from party lines to private lines in the telephone system. Now that we live in the 21st century shouldn't we demand a similar switch for email?
Because privacy is, at its core, a fundamental human right. Every communication system we use should have privacy built in: if its not, there should be a very good reason why not. "Oh dear, it will take extra computational cycles" is not a good reason, not with the small footprint crypto already here. "Oh, Ashcroft doesn't want it" is even a worse reason.
Why is privacy a basic right? From the well-written essay by Canada's former privacy Czar
"If Parliament and the public at large have been slow to react, it is probably because for most people, most of the time, privacy is a pretty abstract concept. Like our health, it's something we tend not to think about until we lose it - and then discover that our lives have been very unpleasantly, and perhaps irretrievably, altered.
But though we tend to take it for granted, privacy - the right to control access to ourselves and to personal information about us - is at the very core of our lives. It is a fundamental human right precisely because it is an innate human need, an essential condition of our freedom, our dignity and our sense of well-being."
" ...A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
"By that reasoning, of course, we shouldn't mind if the police were free to come into our homes at any time just to look around, if all our telephone conversations were monitored, if all our mail were read, if all the protections developed over centuries were swept away. It's only a difference of degree from the intrusions already being implemented or considered.
"The truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others. Most of us are only willing to have a few things known about us by a stranger, more by an acquaintance, and the most by a very close friend or a romantic partner. The right not to be known against our will -- indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves -- is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.
"If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl. Even if we suffered no other specific harm as a result, that alone would profoundly change how we feel. Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy...
"...The bottom line is this: If we have to live our lives weighing every action, every communication, every human contact, wondering what agents of the state might find out about it, analyze it, judge it, possibly misconstrue it, and somehow use it to our detriment, we are not truly free. That sort of life is characteristic of totalitarian countries, not a free and open society..."