All the more reason to keep bad actors in containers isolated from the rest of your web browsing. Google can fingerprint me all they want if that gets their rocks off, all they'd see is my gmail inbox that they see anyway.
When you use Gmail, Google will try to identify you and identify the people who email you, and draw connections between you and inferences from your communication.
I really don't understand why someone like you who is evidently seriously against surveillance and who values privacy would give Google more ammunition to do that.
Email is indeed woefully insecure, but the problem with Google's "privacy" policy has little to do with whether or not email is a secure medium or not. It's about social norms, and Google's institutional ignorance of them.
Privacy is created by social norms. It's no technical challenge for me to borrow your paper mail from your mailbox, steam it open, read it, copy the bits I find interesting, seal it up again, and replace it in your mailbox. But, in doing so, it's understood that I'm doing an awful thing. It's so awful that it's against the law:
... and, all else being equal, juries will not be inclined to sympathize with me.
Similarly, it's somewhere between very rude and illegal, depending on circumstances, to intercept or interfere with someone's email. If you happen to glance at someone's email you're expected to keep politely silent about it, as you would be if you happened to glimpse your neighbor through a window of their house. You're certainly expected, under pain of felony charges, not to tamper with or forge someone's email, just as you're expected to avoid entering your neighbor's house without knocking even if the front door is standing open.
Google, on the other hand, seems to be constantly trying to establish the precedent that it's perfectly normal and polite for any aspect of your life - currently including, but presumably not forever limited to: the state of your front yard, the contents of your photo album, the list of movies you've watched on YouTube, and the contents of your mailbox - to be sampled, data-mined, correlated, and archived forever by entities completely outside your knowledge or control so long as those entities are using secret algorithms to do it.
If you'd tolerate this behavior in a friend, you may by all means continue to have Google as a friend. I, however, am getting increasingly uncomfortable with Google sitting in my living room, and am increasingly tempted to escort them politely but firmly to the door and then deliberately misplace their address.
That Google snoops and watches your video, photos and emails should not be a surprise to anyone in 2022.
If your entire online identity is tied to a string that ends in @gmail.com they own you.
If I recall correctly, there's less a concern about Google than there are of malicious third-party data harvesters that gain full access to users inboxes by offering their service under the guise of being an email client. Edison Mail, Slice, and Rakuten are among the many offenders.
If you're sending someone an email, Google keeping track of "John Doe emails huhtenberg@whatever.com" is much less of a threat than all of the dozens of intermediate parties that will record your email indefinitely.
I have a Google Workspace account with multiple users. Some of which are devoted to being trash collection inboxes. I try to expose my personal email as little as possible
If they're not using it for ads, there's a good chance that it's in Google's best interest to not know the contents of people's email. It lessens the impact of a potential breach, and it greatly simplifies their responses to gov't requests to 'we have no method to access this data, you must contact the account holder directly'.
Hmmmff. even if I did wan't to do something the best I could manage would be to use and have my friends use encryption for all further gmail contact. Google already has a record of my mail for the last 6 years, even if I deleted it all.
reply