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posted by martyb on Wednesday June 04 2014, @04:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-we-know-who-your-friends-are dept.

Today Google announced the alpha release of a Chrome plugin that works with their Gmail service to enable end-to-end encryption for email sent through their system. This will reduce Google's ability to data-mine the content of messages, but it won't stop anyone from tracking senders and recipients. Their plugin is based on OpenPGP and they are publishing the source code.

With a focus on ease-of-use lets hope that this plugin is enough to start a broader movement towards end-to-end encryption for all email, regardless of provider.

Editor's Note: This is an early release of the code and should not be relied upon just yet. Google invites the community to test and evaluate the extension; it is even eligible for their Vulnerability Reward Program.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday June 04 2014, @07:35PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday June 04 2014, @07:35PM (#51314)

    This would be based on the assumption emails contain information.

    Most of my emails are now just commercial traffic. Receipts, shipment confirmations, etc. If those are already owned and shared... Perhaps the most useful feature is mining, so I've done business with "the broken token" company (a gamer dude with a laser cutter and some good ideas, pretty much) and once XYZ number of people do business with them, then lean on them to pool share all the data.

    So there's little point in email beyond gross metadata if amazon is already selling them a list of everything I buy anyway.

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  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday June 06 2014, @01:58AM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Friday June 06 2014, @01:58AM (#52010) Journal

    Yeah, 99% of my email these days are mass lists or corporate messages. Those just aren't going to be encrypted. Amazon isn't going to encrypt their mail, and it'd be pretty difficult to encrypt an entire mailing list. What does Google care if they were to lose the ability to target ads based on the emails I send to my brother? The emails I get from Amazon are probably a lot more lucrative for that anyway, and Amazon sure as hell isn't going to be adopting PGP emails any time soon.