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Gmail confidential mode

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Re: Gmail confidential mode

#191

Post by Dylan16807 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #189
Dylan16807 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The email should be received, filtered, and put into a database with an index. If any information escapes this database, outside of going to the user's email client, then we have a privacy problem with google "reading" the mail. This definition isn't perfect but it should be enough for to you understand the intent.

You agreed to their use of all data when signing up for your free account with gigabytes of free storage.

Yeah, but we should clearly distinguish it as a price.

Re: Gmail confidential mode

#192

Post by exolymph »

lotu wrote: post #182
incompatible wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't really sending email any more, just a link to a website.

This is unfortunately how lots of people and companies think "secure" email needs to work. Any message from my bank or doctor works this way even it is something as simple as an appointment reminder. It is massive waste of user's time and programing effort, but I'm afraid that is where the world is moving.

Harder to spoof or phish (depending on the implementation). I know that a message shown on my bank's main website, with the correct URL, is legit.

Re: Gmail confidential mode

#193

Post by scintill76 »

tracker1 wrote: post #171
teekert wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Can't print this email? Let me forward to my non-secure other address. Huh, message is going to expire? Better make a screenshot that syncs who knows where. If they were serious, they'd create a mode that mirrors Protonmail, where they can't even read your stuff. And make it easy to use PGP. As suggested below/above, the fact that our company Office365 Android env stops me from copy pasting text to other apps do…

I'm curious how they prevent printing.. is it a custom chrome configuration, and they only allow viewing in chrome? Even then... Copy/Paste, F12, copy/paste, etc. Agreed on the forward thing. Though, fortunately I'm not currently as locked down as your android config, it would seem. It's a relatively nifty feature for users emailing from/to gmail only and then likely just to match a couple of feature people have come…

I think it would be easy with standard CSS: @media print * { display: none } Yes, it's circumventable, but they're going for accidental leaks, not intentional.

Re: Gmail confidential mode

#194

Post by thefounder »

What a stupid thing. You may think that Google doesn't know how email works in the first place. Expiring emails?? DRM(rebranded as IRM) ?? Thank god we have so many email providers and these "features" are worthless outside of gmail.

Re: Gmail confidential mode

#195

Post by dragonwriter »

gtsteve wrote: post #138
gibba999 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two schools of thought: 1) Security has to be enforced by code 2) Your employees are reasonable, and won't try to maliciously bypass security controls I'm firmly in camp #2. In a normal corporate setting, a locked door or a locked cabinet is security, even with a cheap, easily pickable lock. That's all this is. And for 95% of corporate applications, that's good enough. If you have high-level executive crime…

Exactly. You might just forward an e-mail to someone with an action without thinking of the e-mail chain below. But if you're taking screenshots or photos of a secure e-mail because it doesn't allow you to copy the text, you know you're doing wrong.

> But if you're taking screenshots or photos of a secure e-mail because it doesn't allow you to copy the text, you know you're doing wrong.

Plenty of office workers use screenshots to copy and paste text into emails, etc., just because, so unless you first break them of this habit, using screenshots to copy secure email isn't really much of a signal of awareness of wrongness.

Re: Gmail confidential mode

#196

Post by cryptonector »

azurezyq wrote: post #128
gruez wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sending an email which communicates something and disappears in a week is helpful. There's nothing on the page that says google will purge all copies after the deletion date. I'd imagine that because google keeps backups, it'd still be available by subpoenaing google.

It explicitly said yes: > Additionally, if your users send or receive messages in Gmail confidential mode, Vault will retain, preserve, search and export confidential mode messages. The message body of received messages will be accessible in Vault only if the sender of the message is from within your organization. Learn more about how Vault works for confidential mode messages here.

I would not read that to imply that the message is not available for discovery. Legal pressure is legal pressure, and data is very hard to delete.

Re: Gmail confidential mode

#197

Post by cryptonector »

samuelfekete wrote: post #7

I would like to see Gmail offer end-to-end encryption for "confidential" emails.

End-to-end encrypted e-mail is an exceedingly difficult problem.

First, none of the envelope can be encrypted, sorry -- that's routing information, and it must be visible to all involved MTAs. The communications between MTAs can be encrypted with TLS, but the MTAs get to see the envelope.

Second, end-to-end key management is an O(N^2) problem unless you have introducers. Who shall be your introducers?

If the introduction problem was trivial to solve, we'd all be using PGP/whatever now. But it's not trivial at all.

Besides that, it's nice to have IMAP/whatever be able to search your e-mail. Which means your e-mail servers need to be able to see your e-mail. You can give up on this if you have your devices decrypt and index your e-mail. This is the only part of the problem that is "easy" -- and you can even encrypt e-mail as it comes in when it's not already encrypted.

Re: Gmail confidential mode

#198

Post by agentdrtran »

glitchc wrote: post #120
maltalex wrote: post #25

Proprietary "extensions" to email make me nervous.

This, thousand times this. Google is trying to remake the internet so that only Google's browser works with Google's version of the internet that operates entirely on Google servers.

outlook had this for years.

Re: Gmail confidential mode

#199

Post by NullPrefix »

jimbobimbo wrote: post #144

There's a phrase that large companies often use to explain "puzzling" features like this to detractors: you are not the target audience. Often this phrase is mis-used to cover up straight up bad ideas, but in this case it's right on the money. The target audience for this feature are CIOs of organizations Google sells G-Suite to. Companies do need IRM on emails, to prevent leaks that could happen by accident or inten…

> It's interesting that they still list screenshots as a possibility: email clients (e.g. Outlook) are able to utilize OS mechanisms to prevent those as well. I thought that browser protected media APIs would allow Gmail opt-in to this kind of protection too.

Next thing you know, youtube ends up on the same list too.

Re: Gmail confidential mode

#200

Post by throwawaymath »

gibba999 wrote: post #106
drglitch wrote: post #72

I feel that many of these pseudo-secure, proprietary enhancements to email create a false sense of security for non-tech-savvy users. Given the smoke-and-mirrors presentation of this as a way to "secure your email^tm" and the plethora of recent info leaks, i am sure some poor c-level exec will get caught inadvertently sharing something with an external recipient thinking that it will disappear in a few days, but then…

There are two schools of thought: 1) Security has to be enforced by code 2) Your employees are reasonable, and won't try to maliciously bypass security controls I'm firmly in camp #2. In a normal corporate setting, a locked door or a locked cabinet is security, even with a cheap, easily pickable lock. That's all this is. And for 95% of corporate applications, that's good enough. If you have high-level executive crime…

> There are two schools of thought: 1) Security has to be enforced by code

2) Your employees are reasonable, and won't try to maliciously bypass security controls

Huh? These aren't competing ideas. They're orthogonal, and should be covered by separate, complementary forms of security assurance.

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