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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."
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.
Why do people always call out, "Just don't use it!" If the minority who saw the truth just ignored the majority product throughout history, we'd be fucked. The minority fighting for change has vastly improved the world on a regular basis.
Also, Google isn't the government. Read what you are replying to.
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...
Why call Google to encrypt your mail? If you are that concerned, you could go ahead and encrypt it yourself.
And if you are not bothered to do it on your own, or are not concerned enough about security, then you have no business complaining about Google.
Like the parent poster said, if you do not like Gmail, do not use it. What did you expect? Somebody off the street to come and give you an e-mail account with the coolest features for free with almost nothing from your side? Well guess what, in real life there is no such thing as free lunch.
And as for the "masses" out there, there's probably way more information floating around in the form of spyware and the like that gather data, than through something like Gmail.
This is the problem if you are the biggest guy around - everyone finds some reason or the other to pick on you.
He is right about the freak-out factor, but then for all you know, its probably a ploy from competitors to put Google at a disadvantage (you never know!).
And besides, if you are that concerned about secure information, plain e-mail is akin to sending confidential information on a postcard.
If you want confidentiality, encrypt your stuff. Why should Google do it for you? If you are that concerned, go ahead and do it yourself.
Encryption is a serious resource overhead - and encrypting for a very large number of people/subscribers (which Google will most certainly have) for very large amounts of data (which again, Google does and will have) is going to be a serious drain of resources.
And it is true - now even for the simplest things, Google is getting picked on. Despite the fact that they are perhaps the most benign (yet) of all the corporates out there. I guess people need someone to rant about. And sugarcoat it all with, "I love Google, but..."
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
Personally I don't have issues with Gmail... in fact I'm looking forward to getting an account.
However, if one is really concerned with privacy, I have to say that the "don't use it" argument dosn't really cut it. While one may not use Gmail directly, invariably one will need to send mails to people with Gmail accounts some time or the other, and the contents of the those mails will end up in Gmail servers.
One might argue that email is inherently public anyway, so sending mail to Gmail address is no different from sending mail to any other email address. (anyone with a packet sniffer in the correct place can peek into the contents of your mail). Well, sure... okay.
But don't keep repeating the cliched "don't use it" credo. It isn't really as simple as that.
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've been using Gmail and I find it incredibly useful. My favs:
1. The keyboard shortcuts: allows me to use web based email the way I use Pine.. do everything without touching the mouse even once.
2. The tracking of emails to display them as "conversations".. so neat, it looks almost obvious.
3. The much griped about text ads are totally unobtrusive, and (faint, faint) they do not even appear on all email pages. Google probably has some algorithm to decide which conversations can get targeted ads.
4. The address autocomplete - no more clicking on email addresses in a popup window to insert them. It works exactly like a proper client application (as different from a browser app)
5. To reply to an email, all I have to do is click in a textbox below the email and presto! the compose widgets are there.. great time saver.. and you can see the conversation on top.
and the best part..
6. The interface is so clean and clutter free - it has google written all over it!
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
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)
But don't keep repeating the cliched "don't use it" credo. It isn't really as simple as that.
Actually, it is. If you're not prepared to trust Google handling e-mail, just who exactly are you going to trust? You don't own an end-to-end wire leading to anybody else in the world. You're just going to have to trust that your ISP or your phone company isn't tapping your connections.
Google's got a rather straight-forward privacy policy posted, and they've even clarified it with an FAQ to try to calm the extraordinary fears over GMail. If you don't still trust Google to do what they say they're going to do... you don't particularly belong on the Internet. How do you know that Carnivore isn't capturing every packet being sent to you right now under some PATRIOT Act secret warrant signed personaly by John Ashcroft?
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...
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?
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.
To clarify what I talk about wrt Google encrypting the mail. That means several things, but the main thing is a call for them (and other webmail providers) to store the mail, indexes and associated data on their disks encrypted with a key derived from your password.
This would not slow anything down. When you logged in, your password would be used to decrypt the needed keys, and then your mail, and the pre-computed indexes, would be available to the software to provide all services. My understanding is that google already does this, as they use an encrypted filesystem on their servers -- the prime difference is that they would now be using your key instead of theirs.
When you log out, the key would be purged from memory. Nobody, not Google, not the government, could read the email records at that point. This is good for Google because if they show up with a court order to hand over your mail they can say "We don't have it." They can ask for a wiretap order to read your password should you log in again, but that is a much harder judicial process. Vastly harder.
There are other encryptions I suggest they do, but the above is the main one. I suggest they use SMTP over TLS. I suggest they support PGP and S/MIME encryption. In doing so, they would not be giving you something as secure as end to end encryption, but they would be doing more than you get by not using any crypto at all.
The government has no involvement here, except where it might try to ban the export of encryption. Fortunately we at the EFF fought very hard on this issue to make it much easier to do this, which is why you see encryption much more commonly in products. (Anybody remember all the hoops you used to have to go to to get a 128 bit SSL capable browser?)
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
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..."