Free Schnail Mail for life
41–50 of 88 posts
Re: Free Schnail Mail for life
#42I don't know why this still surprises people, or why Google is being singled out here. Information is transmitted by copying. Every provider has to look at and analyze your messages if they want to do clever things to them, like let you search your archived mail server-side. Even if they don't do anything with your messages themselves, they're still compelled by the government to parse through it all. Nothing is safe…
Google is singled out due to the humans behind the corporate facade complying, no one forced them to. I would hate to reduce it to binary but things like installation of proxy hardware (Blue Coat[1]) to monitor with or court orders for conscription of local hardware are. Without people collaborating along with the US government, then people... wouldn't be collaborating. Those within the USG would be forced towards al…
I may have missed some clarifications, so I feel the need to ask:
Did the USG not force Google to comply with their demands, and also keep quiet about it? I know that was the initial story.
Or is the issue that Google went above and beyond the USG's requests?
Re: Free Schnail Mail for life
#43In my opinion, this kind of argument is demagoguery and ignores practical security concerns. For the average person, which is more likely? (1) A hacker taking over their email account to get bank info, etc. (2) Some nebulous threat from Google having too much information about you. Google and Gmail offer some of the best security controls and threat detection of any webmail provider that I've seen (pioneered two-fact…
> Government snooping is a separate issue, but as far as I know there are no major email providers that a non-technical person can use that aren't vulnerable. But at least, those other email providers are different that your web search provider - while if you use Gmail, your profile will also contain your searches (if you use Google for search), visits from those searches, and then also data from other Google service…
If you're talking about government snooping, they most likely can aggregate information from different sources.
If you're talking about the nebulous "one company has all my information and may do something evil" argument, I still say that it doesn't matter. Email is by far the most sensitive thing most people do online, so if there was a real threat from a company having all that information, also having searches is not substantially worse.
Regardless, I still don't see a credible threat of harm from Google having this information that outweighs the actual threat of hacking.
Re: Free Schnail Mail for life
#44Anyone who has ever Googled their name and hometown must realize how much information is being sold about us. Google is just presenting the top layer, but this problem is a very old one. For better or worse, I think we have to get used to a post-privacy society. If it forces us to be more tolerant of each other's imperfections (because our own are shared with the world) all the better.
Re: Free Schnail Mail for life
#45In my opinion, this kind of argument is demagoguery and ignores practical security concerns. For the average person, which is more likely? (1) A hacker taking over their email account to get bank info, etc. (2) Some nebulous threat from Google having too much information about you. Google and Gmail offer some of the best security controls and threat detection of any webmail provider that I've seen (pioneered two-fact…
Wow, that's a rant you wrote! We should use software that allows encrypting of sensible information on the client's side. That's it. If they want show me ads - all right then, let me choose out of categories that I'm really interesting in(i.e. Android, Ruby, running, my favorite authors and tv-shows etc-etc). And I will click that links.
> Wow, that's a rant you wrote!
Thanks :) I'm tired of seeing this kind of post over and over again. At best it's misguided in that it's only telling half the story, at worst it's linkbait.
> We should use software that allows encrypting of sensible information on the client's side. That's it.
Well said. If you care about security, this is the answer. We really, really need good, ubiquitous email encryption software. Unfortunately it doesn't seem likely to be widely adopted anytime soon.
> If they want show me ads - all right then, let me choose out of categories that I'm really interesting in(i.e. Android, Ruby, running, my favorite authors and tv-shows etc-etc). And I will click that links.
The holy grail of online advertising is ads that provide value to the user. This is the model behind sponsors of nerdy podcasts (http://5by5.tv). The ads reads can actually be helpful. It's not easy to do with a user base as diverse as Gmail's, but I'm sure Google is trying.
Re: Free Schnail Mail for life
#46Knowing in advance that the intent is to read my mail feels icky and invasive. Google did not start out reading our mail; their approach was a classic case of the slow-boiled toad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog).
Perhaps you should gain users confidence and trust first by NOT reading their mail and giving them an opportunity to become reliant on the service. At less than 0.50 per piece, postal mail is not so expensive that it weights a risk/benefit analysis in your favor with this model. Most people would probably opt to just continue paying for their mail versus having it read. (Also, not sure people want to create bad friend karma -- ha! -- by having their friends spammed with "junk" mail.)
Moving from critiquing to finding a more viable option: I think you can still make money with this upfront by "skinning" the mail with fully printed ad envelopes (obviously with windows for the addresses to show) paid for by general consumer advertisers who don't have as much of a need for making sure they are hitting a niche group.
Once, and if, you gain a critical mass of users then you could introduce the "read" option with some kind of incentive to get people to opt-in. At least they will trust you more by that time, theoretically. And you could then sign up more advertisers including niche marketers.
The current model is not palatable -- unless it were used by a small business/entrepreneur that is sending marketing mail and therefore does not care if it is read (but that then poses a problem of them potentially having a competitor's materials inserted with their materials). If the model remains as is I would have to say #schnailmailfail.
-Felicia Joy @feliciajoy
Re: Free Schnail Mail for life
#47Disrupting postal services industry! Liked the idea. Except its name starting with 'sch' :/
Re: Free Schnail Mail for life
#48Machine "reading" the email != humans reading the same thing A machine can't laugh at your embarrassing confession. Nor can a machine talk about your letter to its friends. For either of these things to happen with gmail would require serious risk and effort on part of an employee.
> Machine "reading" the email != humans reading the same thing Try saying that in any of the gajillion PRISM threads.
Machine "reading" the email to glean useful advertising data != machine "reading" the email to find any excuse to label you a terrorist.
Re: Free Schnail Mail for life
#49The problem with email is that we've arrived at a monoculture. TLS-enabled email is pretty secure if nobody can compromise either of the two ends (or, well, the intermediaries). Since everyone uses Gmail, it's trivial to just get everyone's email, since one of the two ends is pretty much guaranteed to be there. If we move to a system where everyone has their own mail server, or at least one mail server for a few peop…
If a system evolved where a significant proportion of communications were difficult for the security services to monitor, encryption would be criminalized and it's users vilified as unpatriotic.
Why do you care about that, we all know that because we all sin, God will all send us to hell for eternity. That hypothetical situation is much more awful than your hypothetical situation!
Re: Free Schnail Mail for life
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The information is there" on all e-mail providers. There is nothing (short of end-to-end encryption) stopping a real person at any e-mail provider from looking at your email. The interesting distinction (for me, and I have been a happy GMail "customer" for close to a decade soon) isn't the profile, it's the human. I have strong faith that Google can be successful in keeping humans from reading my e-mail (or a comput…
Not always. Several new security-oriented email providers boast diskless email servers and end-to-end encryption.
Yes, end-to-end encryption would fix all this, but it would also fix it in OP's satirical mail service, as well as in GMail - so that's really a tangential point.
Trusting that those providers don't start siphoning off a copy of your mail (or are indeed diskless and not out of malice or incompetence actually just using regular disks. Also, being diskless is worthless if they are still keeping your mail around in memory anyway) is no different than trusting Google to keep humans away from my email.