Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)
What It Means for Google to “Have” Your Email
- Some argue Google only “has” non-Gmail users’ mail in a weak sense: messages sit on its servers but aren’t tied to a Google account, so subpoenas are harder.
- Others say this is outdated semantics: large-scale programs and today’s legal environment mean Google effectively does have and can expose that data.
- Even if you avoid Gmail yourself, corresponding with Gmail/Outlook users still puts much of your traffic on big-provider infrastructure.
Government Access and Surveillance
- One camp is relaxed: lawful subpoenas used for malware, child abuse, or national security are seen as a necessary abuse-mitigation tradeoff.
- Another sees this as naïve, citing rising request volumes and the potential for mass surveillance and political control once everything is stored and searchable.
- There’s tension between targeted investigations and “fishing expeditions,” and disagreement over how often abuse actually happens.
End-to-End Encryption: Theory vs Practice
- S/MIME and PGP are cited as technical answers, but most agree they’re unusable for normal people: key management, interoperability, and onboarding are too painful.
- Some note S/MIME has better client support and may improve with ACME-style provisioning; skeptics point out PGP has had decades and still failed to go mainstream.
- Critics warn that if e2e became common, providers would just host users’ private keys to preserve webmail convenience, undermining the core privacy benefit.
- Many suggest using dedicated secure messengers (Signal, etc.) instead of trying to make email a secure channel.
Self-Hosting vs Big Providers
- One side calls self-hosting or “de-googling” irrational paranoia that reduces security, wastes time, and rarely changes outcomes.
- Others cite surprise bans, lockouts, and principle: they don’t want critical communications and identity controlled by advertising companies.
- A middle ground: don’t self-host, but pay smaller providers (Fastmail, Proton, etc.) and/or use your own domain to retain portability.
Email as Identity and Lock-In
- Email has become a core identity and recovery mechanism; losing an account (especially at Google) can mean losing access to “half the internet.”
- Owning a domain gives control but introduces risks (domain expiry, takeover); using @gmail avoids that but deepens dependency on one company.
- Aliasing services can help decouple identity from a single address, but create new single points of failure.
Monopoly Dynamics and Deliverability
- Big providers’ spam policies and reputation systems make it hard for small/self-hosted servers to reliably reach users; businesses often get blamed and pushed into corporate email bundles.
- Many apps and integrations only support Gmail/Outlook, implicitly equating “email” with those platforms and sidelining alternative providers.
- Some see this as a byproduct of anti-spam pragmatism; others see deliberate or at least convenient entrenchment of monopolies.
How Email Is Actually Used
- Several argue email should be treated like a postcard: assume anything might become public, and don’t use it for truly sensitive content.
- Others counter that, for normal people, email now carries receipts, personal data, and acts as auth; users absolutely expect privacy.
- Younger users reportedly use email mostly for business and official interactions, relying on chat apps for personal communication, though experiences vary by demographic and “bubble.”
Privacy Attitudes and Data Value
- Some shrug: they “have nothing of value,” trust big firms more than random hackers, and accept commodification of their data as long as it doesn’t visibly hurt them.
- Opponents emphasize that aggregated behavioral data is highly valuable and can enable subtle manipulation, discrimination, or political targeting at population scale.
- There’s a recurring sense of fatalism: individual action (self-hosting, quitting Gmail) barely moves the needle without coordinated, regulatory, or structural change.