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You're absolutely right. Turns out they changed this behavior in 2017. Thanks for making me look into it.
You’re welcome. I found it fascinating at the time of the change, and still do, that email is sacred, but all other activity is open for manipation-based-advertising.
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>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 white…
I do remember some app not "letting" me screenshot something with stock Android, which I felt to be a violation of my freedom. Obviously in my case just use a modified Android ROM without the silly anti-screenshotting logic, or screenshot it with adb over USB, but for the less-technically inclined, take a picture of the phone.
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Why is it hard to understand? Because your average user will not "wireshark their own cables", and those who do will use different methods of secure communication. You'd be surprised how many users are unable to bypass various extremely simple restrictions - and this is the target market for these features. On top of that self deleting email will make it also a bit harder to prove that the screenshot is real - unless…
> On top of that self deleting email will make it also a bit harder to prove that the screenshot is real Except it isn't deleted from your send folder.
It's not unusual for whole sales organizations in particular industries have all emails archived under legal hold requirements (whether sent or received.) Another set of organizations will purge all of the same email older than than a certain date.
None of these measures are particularly hard to defeat for a bright user, but many of the risks at the company-level are mitigated. This is mostly to solve challenges with regulation or company certification, but it can make a real difference when someone is handling a privacy incident.
Yes, Google isn't untrustworthy and doesn't care about the users privacy, we knew that, but the general public that isn't as aware (at this point it's hard to be completely unaware) also doesn't read this private company blog, so it doesn't really help much (except advertise the company). We should be thinking of ways to improve the situation for everyone (not saying I have the solution), but personally (and unfortun…
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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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_loophole
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>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.
Sure, but that is equally true for products like protonmail that use end-to-end encryption and for those that don't do any encryption at all.
Google is making an entirely different claim about controlling the actions of a third party. It's fundamentally impossible to do what Google is claiming.
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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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_loophole
This could be a useful feature when dealing with PHI, legal, HR, etc.
"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…
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You’re welcome. I found it fascinating at the time of the change, and still do, that email is sacred, but all other activity is open for manipation-based-advertising.
If they don’t scrape your email how is this page generated then? https://myaccount.google.com/purchases
Gmail has no incentive to create anything secure or private because that would prevent them from going through your email to show ads. [This is wrong] Update! Gmail changed this behavior a while ago. Went under my radar: https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-email... Thanks!
“We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.” https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en
We will not scan your messages. (One possible reason we would have done this would be for advertising.)
vs.
We will not use the scans we perform on your messages to make advertising decisions.
I'm honestly not sure which it is (although I also don't care much personally since I don't use Gmail).