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Review of GMail for Your Domain
DevanJedi writes "Google recently started offering GMail hosted email service, with 25 free 2 GB email accounts, for universities and beta-testing private domains. Science Addiction has a review of the GMail for Your Domain service and its features including screenshots and speculation on future Google free and paid hosting efforts."
So much for the folks at http://www.google-watch.org/gmail.html. They suggest folks never send mail to gmail.com, and provide boilerplate text to reply with in case someone at gmail.com mails them.
Well, now they might be sending mail directly to Google's servers without even knowing it! I find it highly amusing that these privacy advocates assume there's any privacy at all regarding the plaintext email they might send.
(I also find it amusing that among their privacy concerns, they also complain that gmail doesn't include the originating IP in the email headers. I guess consistency doesn't matter as long as they're railing against the great beast Google.)
Not really. It seems more and more Google is taking things that have already been done, and just putting their own branded spin on them, often with much better functionality. I mean, MS already did webmail, yahoo already did finance, maps, etc.
Just another dingus in the line of GoogleDingus®.
hi mom!
Meh, Yahoo! had it first before either of them anyways. Doesn't matter who did it first, what matters is who does it better.
Yeah, nothing is more professional than handing over your business email to google with their unlimited data retention policy. All my 'business' email with your organization will end up on googles server forever to be part of my demographic profile and who knows what else is done with it. All this and I didn't even sign up for gmail.
Next thing you know this will be solution for those FBI agents without fbi.gov addresses.
Yeah, nothing is more professional than handing over your business email to google with their unlimited data retention policy
Have the Enron trials taught us nothing?
No corporate email is truly private. (possible exception for encrypted stuff. how many 'regular' businesses do that anyway?) If the government wants to read your mail, they'll subpoena it and get it anyway. If a competitor (I work in construction, a non-IT business) wants to read your mail, well, they're out of luck either way, unless they get a court order - at which point, it doesn't matter whose servers the mail is on.
Hell, by passing the buck to Google, it might save you some hassle on the Sarbanes-Oxley data retention stuff.
I think I need a new sig here.
Maybe I'm wrong, but as far as I've heard, most if not all commercial email services retain your email messages and this information is subject to warrants.
Google at least has a track record of fighting the government when it feels they have no business to ask for the information. Most of the telcos simply rolled over when the government started tapping phone calls without warrants.
I'm sure Google wasn't the only search provider approached by the government to provide search data. Why didn't we hear about the others? Maybe they just forked over the information.
Again, my knowledge of the subject is imperfect, but it doesn't seem to me that Google is any worse of a choice than others.
I think people are confusing the issues here. If I send an email to a company online, I expect that company to protect my email according to their privacy policy. By 'contracting out' your email hosting to a third-party, in this case google, any privacy policy you adopt with me is meaningless.
This isn't about the government reading my mail with a subpeona. This is about my communications being disclosed to a third party whose sole business model is extracting the maximum advertising dollar out of that information without my permission.
As far as Sarbanes-Oxley, that law only applies to public companies registered with the SEC in the US. And even then since you have absolutely no control over what google does with the data, how could you have any assurances about data detention?
You are correct, I only addressed one of the privacy issues.
I see two (largely generalized) issues:
1) Google's internal use of your information, basically for advertising.
2) The external use of your information, whether it be third parties, the government, competitors, whoever.
This is basically defined by the terms of use.
As to #1 (internal use): Personally, most of my work email is very mundane and has lots of attachments. I'm an engineer, working offsite. Lots of large attachments with drawings and calculation packages. (Yes, we've got an FTP site for the big stuff, but a dozen 2-meg emails a day add up in a hurry.) If Google thinks they can profit from selling ads based on my co-worker's ALL CAPS emails on the finer points on contract management and gear meshing, more power to them.
As to #2 (external use): the gmail policy specifies that they only sell aggregate data, not personally identifying. Not particularly problematic, at least to me. That is, I don't own a tin foil hat.
To each their own.
Oh, data retention does look kind of shaky. However, I kind of like the idea of being able to categorically say 'not my problem'.
I think I need a new sig here.
Flawed for two reasons :
1) most address validators don't recognize this as a valid address
2) spammers can extract your real address after you've blocked the catchall alias you provided them.