Google's Secret Is Out

The secret is out!  Google and other email service providers track, store, and analyze your email.  They claim that the service is free, and they have every right to monitor and analyze your emails.  Yes?  When you do searches  or even read your email, you see on your screen promotions that not surprisingly address your personal concerns.   It goes even further, in that they maintain permanent records of your email.  This implies corporate secrets, family secrets, and even government secrets are available to third parties, and particularly those to whom they market such information.  It has even been discovered that IRS officials have been using these services for official work. 

Previously we reported on a number of high-level scandals involving the emails  of some officials and their various peccadilloes.  But now the range of activities seems to extend to e v e r y single person.

Example.  If I was the president of Corporation A and I wanted to know what the president of Corporation B is doing, and if a email address is known, this information can be purchased. 

Multiply this over  hundreds or thousands of special interests with a concern about their opponents.  Can foreign governments access the "ZitMail" records of persons or companies with whom they are involved?   The information is sitting on a server somewhere.  The scope of the  full implications are so  momentous it challenges the mind to grasp it.

For those of you familiar with regular postal mail, imagine if you will, that the US Postal Service regularly opened all your mail, copied it, and then analyzed and stored it in perpetuity. This includes letters from your banker, your mom, your business partners, and everybody else.   You would be incensed, not to mention shocked, not to mention outraged.  Yet, the outrage against these email services, while shocking to us all, seems to be hitting a soft landing.  We say, "Oh well, that's our new normal."

All of that said, your should encrypt your email if you really don't want it read.  Period!  You cannot escape through the anonymity of the massive scale of the totality of messages.  There are programs and servers capable of the analysis of this data that range far beyond the scope of your imagination.  For example, Google has a publically availabe Ngram code that has analyzed millions of books for work frequency counts.  See http://books.google.com/ngrams/.  

A rule of thumb is that if you don't want your message read, don't send it.  A former solution was to make the communiques by phone, but now this is even suspect.  In generations past, much serious communications was conducted only face-to-face in a secure location.  Those folks knew the risks of written information - translated now to e- and voice mail.  

The caveat to the rule of thumb above is encryption.  In a previous blog, I outlined how to do this - easily and for free.  See.
http://used-ideas-quickies.blogspot.com/2013/01/encryption-for-those-in-need.html
The code is written for relatively small emails of a few hundred words, but we can make it available to those needing greater capacity. 

Cloud computing.  All the rage these days is cloud computing, wherein you store your data in the "cloud" accessing from any computer anywhere you may be.  It is safe, it is secure.  Maybe.   But you can be assured everything you have in the "cloud" and you don't even know where that cloud is or who owns it, has been mined or is available for mining.  Cloud computing may protect your data from your neighbor, but your data is known nonetheless.