Same with Google Analytics.<p>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).<p>There is no way really to avoid Google knowing a lot about you/your website anymore.
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.<p>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."<p>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.<p>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.
I played with an idea of an off-site delivery the GMail-destined emails.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I never got past a rough prototype though, but perhaps I should've.
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.
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.
"Peter pointed out that if all of your friends use GMail, Google has your email anyway."<p>Peter reminds me of the old "If you have nothing to hide..." fallacy. I'd have expected more from the EFF.<p>Yes, anything really sensitive should be PGP'd anyway, but using gmail still gives google the opportunity to do analytics's.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>Well, beneficial if you'd consider keeping email off Google's centralized servers a good thing.
I don't really see this as a problem. The kind of language makes me think of those that wear tinfoil-hats.<p>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.
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.