The point of confidential mode is for corporate users. When the CEO sends out that confidential mail to the company, it adds a speed bump to users who are about to copy out data that they have been told they should not, so they get a chance to realize they should not do this, and then removes all plausible deniability when they choose to bypass that speed bump.
Gmail confidential mode is not secure or private
31–40 of 226 posts
Re: Gmail confidential mode is not secure or private
#32This is a feature that Outlook already has and corporate users expect. It's for making forwarding sensitive emails or any of their content require intent instead of being accidental.
If "accidental" is the true worry, display a confirmation/warning box before forwarding. There are valid reasons to need to forward even e-mails marked confidential, including lawsuits, harassment cases, or even just asking your own lawyer before signing an agreement, among others. Deciding when a piece of information should not have been forwarded is the job of the workplace or law, not the e-mail client.
> There are valid reasons to need to forward even e-mails marked confidential, including lawsuits, harassment cases, or even just asking your own lawyer before signing an agreement, among others.
Those are reasons for employees to forward an email, not the companies who Google is selling to.
Re: Gmail confidential mode is not secure or private
#33> It can still be accessed by Google and potentially exposed to governments or hackers. The article makes the classic mistake of assuming everyone has the full security apparatus of a country after them. This feature is obviously not built as an alternative to Signal or for the Snowdens of this world. These probably know better than using unencrypted email already. For the average user it's an improvement of the curr…
It's an article posted by protonmail, an email service that would be used by the Snowdens of this world. I think it's just a nice way for them to further get their company name out.
Re: Gmail confidential mode is not secure or private
#34"Options for recipients to forward, copy, print, or download this email's contents will be disabled." I simply don't understand how they think they can get away with this foolishness. I can forward, copy, print, or download ANYTHING that passes over my ethernet cables. Your silly UI will ultimately never stop me from wiresharking my own cables in my own home and doing whatever the hell I want with any bits of informa…
All DLP products are like this. They impose basic limitations that can easily be bypassed by anyone remotely technically inclined. I've come to the conclusion that these products are just to cover the low-hanging fruit situations of someone accidentally doing something that they shouldn't have. In other words, it's a UI integrated "DO NOT FORWARD" message from an e-mail.
I think this is correct. This is to help management say that if if there is a policy and it’s violated that it can’t have been accidental because extra conscious steps have to be taken which violate policy. Making it easier to make people adhere to policy (and discipline as well).
Re: Gmail confidential mode is not secure or private
#35"Options for recipients to forward, copy, print, or download this email's contents will be disabled." I simply don't understand how they think they can get away with this foolishness. I can forward, copy, print, or download ANYTHING that passes over my ethernet cables. Your silly UI will ultimately never stop me from wiresharking my own cables in my own home and doing whatever the hell I want with any bits of informa…
Consider for a moment: a company or school set up as an Enterprise Mobile Device Management provider, handing everyone out ChromeOS devices, setting up their GSuite domain so that nobody can connect to their GSuite GMail accounts except through the ChromeOS device (or an equivalent MDMed mobile device), and setting up an automatic, un-disable-able VPN on those devices for accessing Google domains. I think that’s the…
It's worth mentioning that all these measures can be fairly trivially defeated by the analog loophole[1]. I suppose it's harder to prove authenticity in that case, however.
Re: Gmail confidential mode is not secure or private
#36This is a feature that Outlook already has and corporate users expect. It's for making forwarding sensitive emails or any of their content require intent instead of being accidental.
Yeah, GSuites it's pretty bad for enterprise use because it's missing such, in my opinion, mandatory features.
Re: Gmail confidential mode is not secure or private
#37"Options for recipients to forward, copy, print, or download this email's contents will be disabled." I simply don't understand how they think they can get away with this foolishness. I can forward, copy, print, or download ANYTHING that passes over my ethernet cables. Your silly UI will ultimately never stop me from wiresharking my own cables in my own home and doing whatever the hell I want with any bits of informa…
I'm surprised no one has come up with a browser extension yet that circumvents this. I'm guessing it would be fairly trivial to do so.
Re: Gmail confidential mode is not secure or private
#38Jeopardy: An email option that encourages people to add OTHER people's phone numbers to Google's database.
Re: Gmail confidential mode is not secure or private
#39"Options for recipients to forward, copy, print, or download this email's contents will be disabled." I simply don't understand how they think they can get away with this foolishness. I can forward, copy, print, or download ANYTHING that passes over my ethernet cables. Your silly UI will ultimately never stop me from wiresharking my own cables in my own home and doing whatever the hell I want with any bits of informa…
>Your silly UI will ultimately never stop me from wiresharking my own cables Or for the less technically inclined, opening the email on your phone/tablet and put it in a photocopier.
Won't the light from the copier reflect off the screen and ruin the image?
When I was in college (early 2000s) a local company sold notes/study guides for different courses. But they were printed in black text on dark green paper to prevent photocopying and sharing.
Good idea on their part but I used my digital camera to take photos of the pages and cranked up the details to make them look like blackish text on whiteish paper. Ended up selling them to all my friends.
Re: Gmail confidential mode is not secure or private
#40"When we launched ProtonMail nearly five years ago, we pioneered a new kind of email service: one that gives you control of our own data."
This is a very unfortunate typo.