[aklug] Re: Google: If you send to Gmail you have 'No legitmate expectation of privacy'

On Wed, 14 Aug 2013, Royce Williams wrote:

> s/Google/corporations and governments/g;
> s/Gmail/the Internet and all other forms of communication/g;
>
> ;-/ (that's a winky-but-ambivalent smiley)

Agreed.

> Though specifically in the case of email, everyone who runs email servers
> knows that plain-text email is subject to operational inspection.
> Anti-spam measures benefit from this access. If someone pressed another
> Internet provider that provided email service, I would expect all of them
> to give similar answers to Google's.

Not necessarily. If I caught any of my admins reading customer e-mail
there'd be hell to pay, automated or not. Unless I have a subpeona or a
customer request we try to not abuse our power. I'd be surprised if that
wasn't the rule, rather than the exception, with most smaller ISPs as well.

> The real question is whether or not email carriers should be restricted by
> law to only access that data for direct operational purposes -- or whether
> they should be allowed to abstract, monetize or aggregate it. If Google
> would step up and explicitly disclaim the latter -- or if the law made
> non-operational common-carrier access to these communications illegal --
> that would be something, but if they have any operational access, they
> could be compelled to hand it over to third parties. Client-side PGP
> integration would help with this (but keep us from benefiting from spam
> filtering).

I think a law like that is necessary if we're to preserve any concept of
privacy. Operational access certainly has benefits, and in some cases,
necessity, when you have to scale services for a large customer base.
I'd wager that all these "free" email services would disappear overnight if
you legally barred them from monetizing that access, however.

As they say: freedom isn't free. Free e-mail isn't free either, you're
just paying for it in another currency: information. Heh, I can't say
"information" in this context without hearing Number Two from The
Prisoner... ;-)

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
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Received on Thu Aug 15 07:51:43 2013