philosophical question about gmail

[Bill McGonigle]

On Aug 5, 2004, at 11:57, Derek Martin wrote:

> It's the principle that no
> one should EVER be reading my e-mail but me and my intended
> recipients, regardless of the contents.  Some people will no doubt
> feel that this principle is, practically speaking, not worth
> defending.

"practically speaking" gets to the root of the issue.  I suspect four 
out of five people on the street would agree with your sentiment and 
three out of four would be willing to click a 'keep my mail private' 
checkbox.

One out of ten thousand is willing to learn GPG and get his keys 
signed, install mailer plugins, etc.  Not to mention that you and I are 
both e-mail encrypters but I'm using S/MIME and you're using PGP.

The technology is here, I assert the users' willingness is here, but 
usable implementations are not available.  AOL, e.g., could issue certs 
to their users and transparently build S/MIME into their service, but 
obviously they don't want to.  Ditto for gmail and all the rest.

-Bill
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