Google: Gmail Users Should Have No Expectation of Privacy

[exfileme]

Google comments cause controversy.

Google: Gmail Users Should Have No Expectation of Privacy : Read more

 

[itchyisvegeta]

That's like saying, "Google CEOs should have no expectations of Class Action Lawsuits."

 

[inerax]

Here comes anonymous..............

 

[inerax]

Here comes anonymous..............

 

[onichikun]

And people think MIME is a secure, authenticated protocol to begin with? Lol. Any server your email goes through can read it's contents and use it for whatever.
Google provides their service through content scanning emails, and yes, they openly admit to delivering content to the NSA. The NSA is the least of our worrys when it comes to our email content leaking. If you want secure messaging, don't use email, or use a email service that ensures privacy.

 

[jonny_76]

No-one should really be surprised especially since it is 'free' But it would have been nice if Google had voluntarily told everyone before we signed up for g-mail.
Is there any corp. email service that does not scan our emails ?
Separate issue, Isn't our govt, by law, allowed to scan all our emails ?

 

[stevejnb]

Here's what gets me... This forum is littered with people who are cheering the rise of Google and proclaiming that Microsoft is the virtual devil and doing gleeful jigs as it goes down, but they're trading the devil they know for the devil they don't. Do you people *really* think that ChromeOS and being wired through multiple Google services is somehow trading out big-bad Microsoft for a lesser evil? I mean, a lot of you are picking ChromeOS for some sort of a moral objection to Microsoft and their "abusive business practices" and whatnot and not because you actually like it better. Is THIS the company you think is your white knight saving you from corporate exploitation in computing? Really???

 

[HEXiT]

what a load of crap... the email header and meta data is all that needs to be scanned to deliver it to its destination, there is no good reason to scan the content as that has no bearing on where the email ends up.
just another example of corporations taking liberties with our data...

 

[ddpruitt]

Well Duh

And the post office analogy doesn't hold up either. If email where like mail only the US government could deliver it, the box would be one they setup, where they like, and how they like. It would also take a month to reach you but I digress. And just like regular mail you would get all the mail for a single household in a single mailbox all mixed together with no filtering. I don't mind google seeing the contents if it get's rid of the spam and properly categorizes everything, the price I pay for convenience. If I want secure I'll encrypt it myself.

And let's face it, the government agents along with "investigators" have been known on numerous occasions to illegally read mail without a warrant and without letting it's citizens know.

 

[SchizoFrog]

The way to send a truly private email (unless 'hacked') is to write it as a doc and compress it with anything else you wish to send with say WINRAR and a password protect it. Then email the password separately, ideally to a different account through a different provider.

The question has to be asked though, are your emails really that important?

 

[inerax]

Here comes anonymous..............

 

[the1kingbob]

I know right... No good reason to scan the internal information of an email... All those neat features like search work on hope and wishes. As for taking shots at gmail, please explain how any other email server does internal searches of email without actually reading the email.....

It has been known for years that good reads your emails for ad revenue... Why are people just now talking about it? Do people believe facebook messages are private as well? Isn't that why facebook started running all emails through their servers so they could claim right-to-read before forwarding to 3rd party email servers?

 

[inerax]

So. whats up with the double posts? even triple in this case.... I only submitted my comment one time...... Broken?!

 

[kujospam]

I personally like being able to search what is inside my mail. Shrugs. With the 10k emails that I save, doing it by title would not work for me. Like search for Humblebundle, ok, I have about 20 emails, now serach for humblebundle battlefield 3. Now I get the right email I'm looking for. Microsoft and others companies have been doing this for at least a decade. The major difference is that, the program wouldn't then send it to some promotional event or company.

 

[ethanolson]

The internet was designed as a free information sharing system. In other words, anything you put out there is a free for all. This younger generation seems to have not been educated as to these things. Remember when the internet didn't even have web pages? Everything was in chat rooms and on gopher. Even email was just managed in open folders with no user restrictions. There was no privacy at all. The fact that we developed a façade of privacy is a miracle because the system can't inherently support it.

 

[senkasaw]

Any user of any non-encrypted email service should always behave as if there is no "expectation of privacy".

 

[COLGeek]

Anyone who sends/receives unencrypted email via ANY provider should consider it fair game. Why does this come as a shock?

 

[brandonjclark]

I just read their privacy policy and it specifically reads "with consent".

 

[belardo]

This really shouldn't be a shock. Anyone who uses ANY off-site web mail service cannot expect full privacy. We do this because its convenient, flexible and portable.

In the "OLD DAYS" - you would use a email client like Eudora / Outlook / Thunderbird to get and read your email. That connection was between your computer and the email server from your ISP (this doesn't mean 100% privacy, but its far more so than WWW). But then again, the email server also has to talk to other email servers...

 

[mobrocket]

@ethanolson

I agree with you... most of the stuff on the internet was put on there by choice.
This idea that privacy exist in everything you do online is not logical

U worried about your emails being scanned or your facebook being read... trying something crazy, like talking to people in person