Quote:
Originally Posted by jgaiser
And neither does the Postal Service. They just send whatever you give them. If you want security, you go out and buy envelopes.
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In a purely technical sense, you're incorrect. There are different stamps with different rates (in the U.S., anyway) for postcards and first-class envelopes. Different rates = different services.
Furthermore, I think it's stretching a bit to equate the difficulty of setting up PGP to work with Gmail with that of buying an envelope.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jgaiser
If you don't, every mail sorter along the way can read your postcard. It's your responsibility, not the Post Office.
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I
don't care if every mail sorter reads my postcard. My beef is with the equivalent of entering all of them into a database that can correlate this postcard with my other postcards and everyone else's as well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jgaiser
There is no and there should be no expectation of privacy.
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I understand that there isn't in fact (and that it's unlikely to get better), but I don't understand why anyone (except Google) would claim that there
shouldn't.
Quote:
Originally Posted by l_macd
Isn't the scanning of emails basically just a computer checking for various keywords to help target ads? And if so, how much an invasion of privacy is it really?
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As a quick example, there's nothing preventing Google from parsing Amazon receipts and recording what you've bought in the past and how much you've paid for it. At that point, they don't know any more than Amazon, but then if they parse receipts from other online stores, Google then knows more about your purchasing habits than any of the individual stores. They can then sell access to that information back to the vendors. It would be relatively easy to figure out if you shop around for a good price or if you pay whatever your favorite vendor charges. From an economic/negotiation perspective, that creates a huge information asymmetry and it's to your disadvantage. So far Google doesn't appear to have leveraged it ("Don't be evil" and all that), but bear in mind that what they're currently asking the court for is the legal latitude to do those kinds of things (or rather, to have the court affirm that they already had it).