Gmail - Privacy?

Hola all,

I've been reading a lot lately about Gmail and was thinking of using it, but I'm also hearing about Google and Privacy.

Is Gmail trustworthy? I mean, more/less than Yahoo or any other e-mail service?

I've been using .Mac and it works fine. I kind of liked some of the things that Gmail had to offer but the privacy things have me a little spooked. I'm not sending/receiving anything super-important, but I would prefer to keep my e-mail as private as possible.

Thx for your input.

JG

I would tend to agree that GMail is a bit spooky. I am quite certain that Google does everything they can to keep your email secure, but:

1/ Google scans your emails and uses the results to target you with what it considers to be appropriate ads. So, something else is "reading" your email, and at the same time, targeting ads at you. That is two evils for the price of one.

2/ Your email is stored on the net, where it could potentially be compromised by the next brilliant hacker who decides to break in. Call me paranoid, but I don't want my private correspondence out of the net where it might potentially be hijacked by people who were not intended to see it.

I think you should keep your email on your Mac, using a local client like Mac OS X Mail, or Thunderbird, or... just pick one and go. All of them strike me as more secure than a net based solution like GMail.

I don't think Google are perfect, but I think the whole Gmail / Privacy issue is a bit of a non-issue really:

mac57 said:

1/ Google scans your emails and uses the results to target you with what it considers to be appropriate ads. So, something else is "reading" your email, and at the same time, targeting ads at you. That is two evils for the price of one.

Click to expand...

Most spam prevention systems also "read" your email and filter it accordingly... GMails targeted ads are doing almost exactly the same: they scan your emails and if they come across the word "Apple", the system displays iPhone ads.

mac57 said:

2/ Your email is stored on the net, where it could potentially be compromised by the next brilliant hacker who decides to break in. Call me paranoid, but I don't want my private correspondence out of the net where it might potentially be hijacked by people who were not intended to see it.

I think you should keep your email on your Mac, using a local client like Mac OS X Mail, or Thunderbird, or... just pick one and go. All of them strike me as more secure than a net based solution like GMail.

Click to expand...

All your email passes through the servers outside of your control anyway, so storing it with Gmail doesn't strike me as being much less secure. The advantage? Iron-clad backups: If I store all my mail locally and the house burns down, it's gone. So I let a multi-billion dollar company worry about that for me

There are a couple of good points going on here, so I'm going to add to the confusion:

Consider getting your own domain, and then host a couple of email accounts on it. Business, Personal, or other sensitive information should be sent via those accounts, using gpg (pgp) encryption, stored on your desktop Mac, and archived via Time Machine.

Then, for public forums, business dealings with unknown vendors (the contests you enter online, the registration requirement for the new applications, etc, use an account on Yahoo or Gmail or whatever. In short, "Yahoo for yahoos."

If I don't know you, you get my yahoo.com account. If I know you but don't trust you not to send me junk, you get the yahoo.com account. If you are that annoying cousin who sends grossly offensive email chain letters? You get the yahoo account. Once you prove it to me that you are smart enough to not include my name on your chain letters, are smart enough to not bother me with products I don't want, etc, then I'll give you my real email account.

www.godaddy.com has great deals on domain hosting. Give it a try for a year. I bet you won't go back... ;-)

Also: There are plenty of utilities out there that will let you use gmail.com to store larger files. If you want additional mail storage, get a gmail account, get gpg, and use one of the available utilities to script a regular backup of your gpg-encrypted mailbox files to your gmail account. With the 6:1 compression ratio that GPG generally results in, you can safely store a ton of email in their systems.

Good luck,
Perry

mac57 said:

2/ Your email is stored on the net, where it could potentially be compromised by the next brilliant hacker who decides to break in. Call me paranoid, but I don't want my private correspondence out of the net where it might potentially be hijacked by people who were not intended to see it.

Click to expand...

Email goes out over the 'net in plain text, anyway. It's about as private as passing notes in grade school.

In addition, if you use an IMAP client, it's always possible that someone could guess your password (or pwn your mail server) and read all of your email. Same thing with POP3, though that is usually kept for a much shorter period.

Short of running your own domain and mail server, and giving out private accounts on it to everyone you want to talk to, or encrypting everything with PGP (probably the best option) there's not much you can do to keep your mail confidential.

Wow, thx guys all for your input. Helping each other out is one of the things I love about the Mac community.

I think I'm going to stick w/ my .Mac e-mail for now. I have a Yahoo acct that I used to use in college but it's mostly dormant now except for the spammers. On the surface, Gmail seems safe enough but it's just that "gut feeling" when it's scanning the e-mails to create ad results. :-\

I don't like .Mac or Yahoo mail for the simple reason that I don't want an email account that I'll need to pay for to use (.mac) or pay to have a reasonable way to access my email (yahoo only offers paid POP/IMAP).

Gmail is free, has a ton of features and I'm willing to believe them when they say their adsense scanning keeps my information private.

Btw - if you access Gmail via POP or IMAP like I do, you don't see any ads whatsoever