I doesn't matter, because it's still nobody's business in my opinion. Right to know and need to know, remember? The first one is debatable, the second one is certainly not given.


Quite frankly, I don't see how you can even avoid sending sensitive data over an electronic channel sometimes.


That's just stupid. Another non-argument along the lines of "you can't do anything against it anyway". Well, at least I can try to do as much as possible - which, compared to using any Google services, is quite a lot.


That's nice, but as you are certainly aware, that's not the case for most users of that service. Just last week, I received an e-mail from one guy using GMail. Doesn't matter what it was about, but suffice to say it was about something positive which I would like to have talked about. Still, I only sent out my standard reply about not replying. Of course, I got a reply from him saying I'm a bad guy for not wanting to talk to him and yadda yadda yadda. It's always the same in such cases: I get all the dirt thrown in my direction for sticking up to my principles and the stupid (sorry, but that's the only way to put it) people actually causing the dilemma get out of it nicely. Mad world

Update: Apparantely, GMail's SSL certificate expired yesterday and there isn't a new one. Amateur hour.

Well, not really... at least not the way I use E-mail. I basically only use it to register at places or to send mails to my work (who are the federal government so who cares if the government intercepts those ). The only persons I mail are my mother and my brother who both have gmail-accounts too. In fact, they had them before me so I don't see how I am forcing anyone to Gmail. I've always preferred real life contact to mailing/phoning/etc.


This warrantless wiretapping I did not yet know about but again, since I'm not affiliated with any terrorist-grouping nor do I ever send out mails about sensitive topics, I really don't mind. They can screen my emails all they like, it'll yield them nothing. And seeing that the sheer volume of mails they screen makes manual screening practically impossible (or at the very least nowhere near as cost-efficient as automated screening), I highly doubt anyone is gonna read the highly classified mails about me visiting my mother on any given day of the week.



In all the time I've been working with Gmail, I have yet to encounter one problem. This is probably related to the way I use E-mail as stated above but as long as it works for me, that's all I need.

Now don't get me wrong. It's not like I approve of what they are doing and I can see that if you use E-mail intensively or if you E-mail highly sensitive/personal stories to other people, you might not appreciate all the screening and storing and so forth. But for me personally it's all rather a moot point.


one small remark here though: it's not because google is the worst one, that the others aren't doing it, they are just not doing it as bad/much as google. so the "oh, they're all doing it" still stands. I never said they were all doing it equally.

Bottom-line is that any form of communication is risky in my eyes (with the possible exception of a real life conversation in a sound-isolated booth you built yourself (well, not one I built myself because like hell that would actually be isolated properly )) but any electronic communication is so unreliable (Echelon springs to mind) that I would never trust sensitive information with it. Best way to maintain your privacy is to keep it off the internet

As I said before, that's fine - however, e-mail communication always requires two people, and the other person doesn't have the choice whether to accept it or not. You force it on everyone else.


Warrantless wiretapping is the key term here. Google is one of the companies which collaborates with law enforcement without the need for a court order.

A light-hearted, but nevertheless true approach: http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/gmail-behind-the-scenes-deleted-scenes

A more serious study about the privacy of various online services: http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347%5D=x-347-553961 (Google comes last - so much for "oh, they're all doing it anyway").

In addition, GMail seems to have some serious technical issues. On the mailing list of my e-mail client, hardly a week passes without another complaint from a GMail user - only that every time it turns out Google is just sending non-conforming mails, not following the protocols and so on. It took them several years to offer IMAP access at all, and to this day, it's still broken. Laughable!

I am one of those gmail-users and I'm fully aware that all incoming mail is scanned and based upon those scans some adds and such appear. I don't feel this is an invasion of my privacy though since google's own privacy policy dictates that they will never hand out personal private information to other parties unless they are required to do so by law (thinking of a court-order and such in case you are doing stuff the law doesn't agree with, but the government/department of justice/supreme court/whatever can do that with any form of communication you utilize).
The scanning of the mails is also done automatically same as with any other e-mail service based on the web. Only difference is that the other ones scan mostly for spam (although you can never be sure that hotmail and the likes aren't collecting other information as well) while Gmail admits to scanning for spam, gathering of information to improve their services and to give so called relevant adds (although in the 4 years or so that I'm using Gmail, I've yet to come across one add that actually interests me. Off course I don't even look at them or notice them...)
In short, it is in my opinion impossible to retain full privacy and go online at the same time. I try to minimize privacy shortfalls whilst maximizing my pc's security and considering all factors, I have no complaints about Gmail, even if they might be plotting global domination through the use of my personal info

I could never understand blogging from either perspective (posting nor reading). The only time it'd be remotely worth it is if you're going on some fantastic trip (with or without acid), and are making a blog of it. Even that's iffy though.

I'm invading your privacy by reading your personal homepage regularly

Blogging is kind of weird. I use my site to post pictures so all my homies can see whats going on. Plus my whole family knows about it, not like those angsty blogs .
I figure that the privacy invasion can't be as bad as when I was on radio, where people you didn't even know would come up to the station and want to talk to you. Some of them quite creepy too.

This 'blogging' is another trend I just don't understand. Who's supposed to be interested in reading these?

One reason many people aren't concerned about their privacy with gmail is the "lost in a crowd" factor, which applies in two ways; 1) With the (potentially) millions of gmail accts, odds are that no human will ever see even a single word of any of your emails, and computer scanners will only be looking for specific key words/phrases. 2) Even if someone does read one of your emails, they'll have no idea who "you" are.
It's similar to the way people will get furious if their kid sibling reads their diary, yet will happily spill their guts to the word on a blog.

By the way - I deactivated the mail forms on the site for Gmail users some weeks ago already. So these people can try as much as they want, they won't be able to send e-mails to us this way

Excuse me. I was relying on natural suspiciousness of the people and that it is well known already. Of course (and sadly) this is not true indeed...

Edited by dregenRocks at 17:08 on November, 11th 2004

Does a mail that is sent from a Gmail account include a signature that says any data is filtered and stored? I don't think it does, and so it is a secret. We know it, but there are millions who don't.


That's what I'm going to do, too.

That's a point, but since it's no secret that gmails reads / stores mail content this fact / these people can be handled with properly.

I will ignore mails from gmail, but tell an indiviual I won't answer his / her gmail-account anymore. Some sort of a boycott.

The problem is just that the Gmail users are not just affecting their own privacy, but they're taking exactly this free choice away from the people they send mail to.

Well, they are the weird, nymphomanic sex-aliens from outer space which control EVERTHING in our MODern societY... haR hAr HAr


As long as people have the option to offer their privacy (Big Brother-container (TV-Series), Bachelor (TV-Series), Camp in Australia (TV-Series), Gmail, etc.) I see no problem in that.

My biggest concern is the amount of phones and cellphones which are wiretapped (?) / listened to secretely by police (not only in usa, since patriotic act, but even more in most of europe).

Edited by dregenRocks at 22:38 on November, 10th 2004

Who are they?

In my opinion it is embarrassing that so many people even consider to use it. It shows how much the importance of privacy has already decreased.

I think they're able to scan the text of attachements and that they do it, since every virus-scanner is able to scan email-attachements, even the content of (uncrypted) archives.

So, if they read all the mails, it would be a logical step to read also the text of attachements. And if they did not have done (?) this until now, they will do it after reading this thread...

I wonder if gmail scans the text of the attachments? A simple way to bypass their scanning might be to put something inane and pointless as the content of the actual email, then put your actual message as an attachment.

Most e-mail clients these days have one either natively or via plugin.

Err.... PGP / GPG have pretty much been the standard in the last few years. I don't know anyone who uses another system for e-mails.

Do you actually have the slightest idea how asymmetric encryption works? You encrypt with the receipient's public key, and that means only he can decrypt it - nobody else! Intercepting such a message is still trivial, but to read it, you need the private key of the receipient.

If you choose an e-mail client which has an 'encrypt if key is available' function, it takes exactly the same time as sending an unencrypted mail, because everything's done automatically. Decrypting is done on the fly with most clients anyway.

Because it's nobody's business what I tell someone else privately? If you don't have a problem with it, please BCC all your e-mails to me from now on.

Because "normal" people doesn't even care about someone else reading their mail, even if they do know about it.

It's just like those stupids contest. You must send something back somewhere with your home adress in case you win, or else you will never get anything... But what do you think they do with the adresses? They post you ads back! (and probably sell the adresses away to another company)

Often when I say this to a lot of people in my neighborhood, they look at me with a vivid face. "They what? You're crazy, they would never do that! It's a respectable business."