Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours

http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours

by martey • 12 years ago

229 103 12 years ago

uptown• 12 years ago

Perhaps helps to explain the mega price-tags being placed on platforms like Whatsapp. If future generations are expected to rely less on email, and more on messaging platforms, then owning the dominant network in that space gives you a competitive angle to take-on Google.

sillysaurus33• 12 years ago

I've always wondered whether Google ever digs into communications in a situation where they're trying to decide whether to acquire a company. It seems like reading a company's email would be a reliable source of information about whether they're on a genuine trajectory or whether e.g. they're having trouble with their investors. I've never looked into whether it'd be illegal for them to do so. Surely in the EU it would be illegal, because privacy protection seems to be a serious concern there, but I don't know about the US.

If you use Google Talk, every conversation you've ever had will be recorded and indexed and tied back to you. If you use gmail, same deal. Even your drafts of unsent emails will be. If you use AIM, same deal: every conversation you've ever had on it will certainly be logged somewhere and tied back to you. Yada yada, same deal for almost every chat program, because almost every chat program has no clientside encryption. If it does, it's not very popular, or it's hard enough to use to where people will think you're paranoid if you ask them to go out of their way to "download this chat program that lets us talk without anyone logging it."

I think the endgame here is to watch what you say. It's safest to assume every text conversation is public. How many of us have said something in text to our families or friends that we'd be extremely uncomfortable saying publicly? It's a little unsettling.

Then again, hopefully when the TextSecure people ship their browser-based chat program things will improve somewhat, because you'll be able to talk to someone else without the conversation being duly noted. (There will probably still be metadata that ties you to the fact that you're talking to someone, but at least the content will be protected.) Hopefully it will be easy to use... I wonder if they need any help in that capacity.

sheetjs• 12 years ago

It's safest to assume every text conversation is public.

Sadly, people who have been saying this for more than a decade were derided as paranoid.

paul3• 12 years ago

No. That's not just evil, and most likely illegal, it's stupid too. It's too easy for something like that to leak, and the damage would be enormous.

sillysaurus33• 12 years ago

Hi Paul. Sorry, I didn't mean to write a conspiratorial comment about Google. I meant to call attention to the fact that every textual conversation you've ever had has probably been logged, and just because our legal and cultural framework presently frowns upon digging through those logs, that may not always be the case in the future. The logs will persist even after our cultural norms change.

So it seems important to come up with a technological solution to the problem of how to communicate without all of it being logged. It's a difficult problem because it's hard to get other people to actually use whatever you come up with. That's why I'm crossing my fingers that TextSecure's browser plugin will take off, because if it's as easy to use as email and as powerful as email, it could have a very tiny chance of becoming the next popular communications platform. At that point no one would have to trust any company to preserve privacy, which seems valuable.

EDIT: I'm confused why my comments were moved to the bottom of this thread, because they don't seem offtopic. For example, the second topmost comment is also about encryption: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7731216

frozenport2• 12 years ago

>damage would be enormous

Would it? The NSA is reading everything and I haven't seen see many changes. I think we as a society need to sit down and figure out if these services should be in the private domain or instead implemented in the public domain that matches with our values. We spend billions, why can't we spend a few to make an internet that doesn't spy on us.

I don't think I could stop using Google. I don't know what would make me stop.

hershel• 12 years ago

We've heard news about google and microsoft spying on user's email. Nothing happened. That's not that different.

nutjob23• 12 years ago

Google paranoia deserves its own entry in the DSM V.

zubairov• 12 years ago

Good point, however as you already noted, it's not a single app or single chat client that can change the situation - it's the acceptance of it among the bigger community. It's not a technical but an educational topic where ecosystem leaders should take the responsibility to educate ordinary people (not just HN readers) on that. I strongly believe this kind of initiatives should have a strong legal/governmental support and/or control.

Theodores• 12 years ago

I've always wondered whether Google ever digs into communications in a situation where they're trying to decide whether to acquire a company.

Go upstream to the Snowden 'allegations' and apply that idea to Lockheed Martin. They can get every government contract they want or whatever war they want because they know what their rivals bids are (because they built the NSA). Plus they run all of the computer security in D.C. and there is no way that any communication in 'elected government' misses their eyes.

PeterisP2• 12 years ago

Reading all gov't internal communication shouldn't be a master key to getting info on rival bids.

Even sloppy bidding processes in random third world countries include the concept of sealed bids - noone in government should have any info on any bid amounts before the bidding is closed; if Lockheed Martin wants to know my bid before making theirs, then they'd have to wiretap me.

Of course, there are many other options for fraud and espionage, but getting rival bid amounts before due time shouldn't be one of them.

arb99• 12 years ago

Same with Google Analytics.

GA is the standard analytics for a huge % of websites - so even if a website doesn't use GA for tracking traffic, Google still has the referral data. And things like Google Adsense (i'm pretty sure that sends back the referral data too, for tracking click fraud).

There is no way really to avoid Google knowing a lot about you/your website anymore.

regecks• 12 years ago

It's still possible to avoid leaking information to GA, by rewriting outgoing links to go through a redirector. Many sites do this (including Google Encrypted Search, but its not perfect).

The email problem sucks though. We need end-to-end encryption, on all mail, today.

pestaa• 12 years ago

You are right about the outgoing links on your site to avoid leakage (this is what well implemented search engines like DuckDuckGo does as well), but I think GP talked about the incoming links of your site. Your pages will appear as exit pages in Google Analytics which you cannot do a thing about.

Sami_Lehtinen• 12 years ago

Using encryption still doesn't prevent massive leak of metadata, and wasn't it news just a few days ago that they do kill people based on metadata.

Btw. I've been also running my own mail servers for ages and have been fed up with Gmail users.

yuvadam• 12 years ago

Google Analytics (and other tracking cookies/scripts) are actually very easy to evade, by using browser extensions such as Ghostery, Ad-block Plus and NoScript.

Smerity2• 12 years ago

You hit the nail on the head.

Google Analytics is on a substantial proportion of the Internet. 65% of the top 10k sites, 63.9% of the top 100k, and 50.5% of the top million[1]. My own results from a research project I did using the Common Crawl[2] corpus estimates approximately 39.7% of the 535 million pages processed so far have GA on them.

The real key to tracking is the referrer data. For the vast majority of clicks, you land on a site that has Google Analytics or you've just left one that did. As Google Analytics tracks your referrer, that means they still have your full browsing history if you jump from GA => !GA => GA => !GA => ...

According to my research[3], Google gets activity information on 51.43% of the 42 billion links analyzed in the 535 million page corpus as either the start or end of the link uses Google Analytics. This activity means they can accurately track browsing history on most sites, even those that don't use GA, simply as timing information, referrers, and knowledge of the web graph end up leaking user activity.

Used in an anonymized fashion, this is beneficial as it helps Google understand real world web traffic and hence rank search results accordingly (far better than simulated activity based upon PageRank or similar). In the theoretical situation you drop anonymization is where this gets troublesome.

If you're interested, there are more details at "Measuring the impact of Google Analytics"[3], though much of the discussion is on Hadoop + Common Crawl. For a privacy focused write-up (primarily worried about the NSA using Google Analytics), refer to "Google, make Google Analytics HTTPS by default"[4].

P.S. Everyone who notes "Google Analytics is easy to evade" are correct but missing the broader point -- the majority of web users will never do that.

[1] http://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Google-Analytics

[2] http://commoncrawl.org/

[3] http://smerity.com/cs205_ga/

[4] http://smerity.com/articles/2013/google_analytics_and_nsa.ht...

MattHeard• 12 years ago

Could a user "fake" additional site visits in between each real visit in order to obfuscate the actual visits to GA sites?

atmosx• 12 years ago

Excellent comments and links!

tombrossman• 12 years ago

In the theoretical situation you drop anonymization is where this gets troublesome.

Here's something even more troubling. Take an 'anonymous' crime reporting site[1] and put Google Analytics on it. Put it on every single page, even on the page with the forms to submit anonymously. Not bad enough? How about a similar site, only this one aimed at reporting corruption[2] and try the same thing. What could possibly go wrong?

Both sites are well aware of the issue and have written me back when I pointed this out. This level of trust in an American ad company is curious. All I can do now is hope that whistle-blowers wanting to report corruption are savvy enough to avoid the web forms.

Imagine you are a government worker somewhere and you see evidence of corruption and report it. From the same machine you signed in to GMail with. Now consider that your local government can order Google to secretly hand over tracking data and forbid them from notifying the crime reporting site(s).

[1] https://crimestoppers-uk.org/give-information/give-informati... [2]: https://forms.theiline.co.uk/integrityline

ronaldx2• 12 years ago

P.S. Everyone who notes "Google Analytics is easy to evade" are correct but missing the broader point -- the majority of web users will never do that.

This is an important point here because it's in stark contrast with Google e-mail. Google's e-mail servers are exceptionally difficult to evade.

I am (apparently) able to evade Google's attempts to track my web browsing habits with Google Analytics. I can take responsiblity for that myself.

This is a technically difficult opt-out process is IMHO against the spirit of "don't be evil", but at least there is an option.

On the other hand, I am totally unable to prevent Google from building an accurate profile of my e-mail habits. The only way I can opt-out here is by significantly curtailing my e-mail habits (or by insisting on PGP, which will have the same effect). This is significantly more frightening to me - I have no choice.

mike-cardwell• 12 years ago

Isn't it about time we dropped the HTTP referer header? If we lived in a World where that header didn't exist, and somebody came along today and proposed that we add it to Firefox, Chrome or IE, there would be absolute outrage. If the proponents then argued: "Yeah, but it will make tracking users easier, and we might be able to target advertising better to make more money", people would not accept that as a valid argument.

dalek2point3• 12 years ago

I'm a PhD student at MIT interested in doing research using the Commoncrawl dataset. Are you interested in working on this together or at least getting together and chatting about it? drop me a line: nagaraj@mit.edu

zerobyzero2• 12 years ago

We should raise concerns about Facebook like buttons too. Its impossible to see a site without like button and it sends all our browsing info back to facebook.

digitalengineer• 12 years ago

I was under the impression FB also tracks all your other browsing even if you log out. So I use a different browser just for FB.

eps4• 12 years ago

Not just GA.

Next time you link to a .css with those wonderful free Google Fonts, ask yourself - what's in it for Google?

Then take a look at all those ajax.googleapis.com links pulling down jQuery libraries and wonder the same.

mike_hearn4• 12 years ago

I wouldn't read too much into that. Google Engineering has huge budgets and all kinds of random projects get paid for with no better justification than "this is good for the web, therefore it's good for us".

I worked there for years. Seeing really deep, well thought out business plans there was a rarity especially for small projects like hosting web fonts or running DNS resolvers. Heck, even for very large projects sometimes the accounting was unbelievably carefree.

blueskin_3• 12 years ago

Block the .js file. Problem solved.

Or, just, you know, disable javascript entirely.

user24• 12 years ago

Problem solved.

Except it's not because the problem's still there for everyone else. Do you really that being shielded yourself but allowing your non-techy friends and family to be tracked is a 'solved' problem?

dan_bk• 12 years ago

Same with Google Analytics.

I always use Piwik [0] - it's excellent, open-source and most of all: it respects your users' privacy by not letting any third party like Google track them.

My advice: Use it too and let your users know that you do so because you respect them.

[0] http://piwik.org

cromwellian• 12 years ago

I think if you're really concerned about the Feds snooping on email, you need to use end-to-end encryption. Any large ISP or portal is going to be a juicy target, and since the majority of people don't want to run their own email servers, the only recourse is not to depend on trusting the servers. Even if you managed to convince everyone to leave G-Mail, they'd still congeal back into another 2-3 big services that the NSA can target.

nutjob23• 12 years ago

If the NSA is targeting you, or you think they're targeting you, then your email provider is the least of your problems.

dredmorbius3• 12 years ago

As Bruce Schneier has commented: he's not against targeted surveillance, undertaken with cause and a specific warrant.

It's bulk surveillance of everyone, everywhere and at all times, that's a problem.

Taking measures which raise the cost of surveillance helps ensure that if they get your data, it's because they really want it. Not just because they can.

anilgulecha• 12 years ago

This standard response misses the nuance of end-to-end encryption: If the default everywhere was EoE encryption, it becomes significantly harder for anyone to target you (for an average value of you)

fphhotchips• 12 years ago

And let's face it, if you run your own email server, it would be a full time job trying to harden it such that the NSA (and others) couldn't get in.

ds9• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure that would be a wasted effort. Basically, you could be nearly NSA-proof only if you use your own cert and are prepared to shut down the whole thing when the Feds demand private keys. But then it wouldn't be useful for general email: it will get blacklisted by various parties you would want to exchange email with, unless you use a CA.

Really the only readily-practical approach for NSA-proofing will be something that's user-friendly in the UI and encrypts end to end. This prevents snooping in transit, but still exposes metadata, and of course there are endpoint attacks.

dasmithii• 12 years ago

I find it incredibly odd that I've never considered this before. I suppose end-to-end encryption is today's only defense against top-down surveillance.

That said, I wonder if meshnet protocol could be utilized as an alternative. Although the traditional mesh network is impractical at scale, a virtual version, or an email-serving proxy network of some sort, could be beneficial.

Well, beneficial if you'd consider keeping email off Google's centralized servers a good thing.

dredmorbius3• 12 years ago

We had something of a meshnet protocol with regards to email previously, or at least, it was generally tenable to run a mailserver on any arbitrary IP address at one time. That ended pretty much by the late 1990s due to the ever growing onslaught of spam.

Today it can be (and often is) frustrating even for established companies to get their mail delivered to all sources. I've had repeated frustrations especially with Yahoo, but also AOL (both continue to have a large number of addresses, if not active accounts -- problems in scrubbing old email addresses is another challenge). Larger companies may have their own idiosyncrasies regarding accepting email -- even with SPF and DKIM records, I've not infrequently encountered companies (some of which, granted, do things involved making littler things out of little things called atoms) who requested (and presumably require) the specific IP address of our outbound mailservers for communications.

More generally, email badly wants to have some sort of reputation layer put on top of it, though how to accomplish this has eluded general solution (SPF and DKIM are only band-aids, and already break a lot of legacy behavior). Total encryption would be good, including of headers. It's a bit of a mess.

mike_hearn4• 12 years ago

All major mail providers already use sophisticated reputation systems. The difficulty of calculating global reputations for the entire internet, quickly and with statistically meaningful results is one of the reasons email consolidates under the control of a handful of big companies. You really don't want to try and replicate that on your own.

Source: I was part of the Gmail spam/abuse team for several years.

adrianN• 12 years ago

There is something like a "email serving proxy network". It's called "anonymous remailer", but nobody uses it and the low number of servers that participate cast a doubt on the level of anonymity that is reached in practice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailer

reedlaw• 12 years ago

Why not offer to host the email accounts of those you contact most frequently? Probably most of them couldn't host their own email server, and if you've already gone to the effort to do so, you can help them increase their privacy as well.

mlinksva• 12 years ago

They might rather unknown Googlers have access to their email than a friend or family member.

deptadapt• 12 years ago

Because running a mail server can be a pretty big responsibility, especially if you're letting others send mail from it. The more people using your server, the more important it will be to monitor for abuse and deal with abuse reports.

When I first set up my mail server I was pretty excited about being able to help everyone I know get their email away from Google, Hotmail etc. But once I had it running, I quickly realized that I didn't really want to give to very many people. Even if I trust all of my friends not to abuse, I cannot trust all of their computers.

rmrfrmrf• 12 years ago

E-mail is not and has never been a secure method of communication.

autodidakto• 12 years ago

Correct. Running your own server, etc, doesn't matter. If what you're doing on the internet isn't encrypted by you and decrypted by a trusted and competent recipient... consider it more or less public.

ilolu2• 12 years ago

Why is google being targeted with all such write ups but Facebook gets a pass. Facebook has many of my photos because it has all of yours. Facebook knows my browsing habits because all of you have have like button in your site etc etc.

noahm• 12 years ago

Because facebook only has my pictures if I choose to post them there. This is easy to avoid. Facebook only has my browsing habits if I choose to allow content from their servers while viewing non-facebook content. This is also avoidable, albeit less easily. Avoiding sending email to gmail users is far more difficult. Avoiding receiving email from gmail users is even more difficult. Additionally, the cost (at least measured subjectively in terms of inconvenience) of avoiding all contact with gmail users is far greater than the cost of avoiding facebook.

So, to answer your question more directly, facebook doesn't "get a pass". Facebook simply doesn't get used.

ericleung• 12 years ago

Not quite sure I agree with that. I think the argument is that Facebook has pictures of me as long as any one of my friends has a picture of me, and has posted it on their own Facebook.

Similar to the problem with Google having access to a large percentage of emails, Facebook will have pictures of me regardless of whether I choose to personally have a Facebook account or not. Assuming that I do have a Facebook, with a network of friends, they can also tag me in their pictures (and therefore available to Facebook) even if my own privacy settings are turned all the way up.

icebraining3• 12 years ago

Facebook only has my browsing habits if I choose to allow content from their servers while viewing non-facebook content. This is also avoidable, albeit less easily.

To most people, it's black magic. In fact, they don't even know that such tracking is possible.

camus2• 12 years ago

Because facebook only has my pictures if I choose to post them there.

Facebook has your pictures when your friends that are on Facebook post pictures of you.

And even if you are not on Facebook,i'm pretty sure facebook has a "shadow account" system to track people even if they dont signup.

ilolu2• 12 years ago

I use Ghostery and block Facebook content from other sites. But what I don't like about Google or Facebook's behavior is that that none of my non-techy friends know that they are being tracked every where. And you cant expect them to understand it too. I find that behavior bad.

eps4• 12 years ago

I played with an idea of an off-site delivery the GMail-destined emails.

Basically instead of an actual email the recipient would get a link to an https'd page on my mail server and a brief note explaining that due to delivery policy the message is available only at the link.

The reason why I started looking at this was that I was buying a house and the broker person was using gmail to handle the transaction. From negotiation to all the forms with all juicy details. I switched him back to the fax mode, but it got me thinking that it'd be nice to have a system in place that would try and offset such negligence, automatically.

I never got past a rough prototype though, but perhaps I should've.

blueskin_3• 12 years ago

Sounds great; I'd love to have this in an interface compatible with Postfix.

andreasvc5• 12 years ago

I don't see why you would single out Gmail at this point. You're basically rejecting email as a secure medium (I don't disagree).

claudius2• 12 years ago

E-mail between secure servers is perfectly secure (and end-to-end encryption only adds content encryption but keeps the amount of metadata generated the same). The problem is that Google’s email servers are not secure; nor are those of any other email provider. Strictly speaking, not even hosting your own dedicated server somewhere will protect you from these issues.

eps4• 12 years ago

No, it's not about rejecting email as a secure medium. It's about denying Google access to the contents of emails I sent to people with mailboxes on their system.

daveid• 12 years ago

If you're sending a link to Gmail, Gmail could simply crawl that link, so I don't see how that would solve anything (except awareness, possibly? At the cost of convenience).

sspiff• 12 years ago

You can block IPs belonging to Google, Micorsoft, ... And make the link expire after a while (you can keep the content, just make it inaccessible).

Not foolproof or without problems (there are not only crawlers and bots at these companies, there are also people who receive email), it would solve the problem in most cases.

sgift• 12 years ago

The problem I see is that you could edit all your "mails" to me at any time, even after I've read them. If that could be fixed somehow I think it would be fine.

im3w1l• 12 years ago

Include a checksum in the email.

klez• 12 years ago

Including a digital signature in the actual email should do the trick.

dkersten• 12 years ago

Reminds me of a time I had to call a company about an order of hardware parts and they wanted my credit card details over the phone. Having worked in telecoms in the past (on carrier server software), this isn't something I like doing, so instead I gave them a URL to a https page containing the details they needed. It also self destructed so you could only view it once.

A general purpose email version of this (both with and without self destruct (which should have options such as timer, N views etc)) would be awesome, especially if it automatically intercepted emails and moved them there. Would have to be something I can host myself, of course.

blueskin_3• 12 years ago

"Peter pointed out that if all of your friends use GMail, Google has your email anyway."

Peter reminds me of the old "If you have nothing to hide..." fallacy. I'd have expected more from the EFF.

Yes, anything really sensitive should be PGP'd anyway, but using gmail still gives google the opportunity to do analytics's.

ronaldx2• 12 years ago

I also found it surprising that Peter Eckersley would be satisfied to justify his use of Gmail in this way.

Peter seems to believe that using Gmail makes his friends' privacy incrementally worse, and yet he is contributing to this problem.

What he really means is: Gmail is more convenient than the other options - there is no better solution to this. And, that's the problem.

perlpimp• 12 years ago

Not if you use GPG. or PGP.

PeterisP2• 12 years ago

What would that change?

In any GPG/PGP solution that I'd use, the encryption would be automated and transparent. In practice, the web-mail-client would anyway decrypt, store and index that email for convenience - no matter what you do, if your recipients/senders use some 3rd party email service, that email service would have access to your emails after the GPG/PGP layer is removed.

What GPG/PGP achieve is defense against MITM/phishing impersonation and secrecy while in transit between email providers; what it doesn't neccessarily achieve is secrecy in storage and defense from your e-mail client software developer. Coincidentally, these are the exact same security characteristics that a gmail user mailing another gmail user has - there are no third parties in transit; gmail can prevent insertions in the middle with a faked sender; but the stored emails are vulnerable to google itself and legal requests made to them.

lewisflude• 12 years ago

I don't really see this as a problem. The kind of language makes me think of those that wear tinfoil-hats.

I always ask myself, who cares? Worst case scenario, Google will sell this data to a government and I'll go to jail. The effort required to secure email at this point isn't worth the time or effort it'd take to maintain.

Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours

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