Gadgetory

hello and welcome to insights fine City Dobson joining me is senior writer for cnet Seth Rosenblatt for being with us thank you okay so a couple days ago we found out that shock gmail is actually a rather Google is looking through our gmail messages um should this have come as a surprise not really Google's been serving ads to US based on keywords that they have detected in the emails for a couple years now this isn't really anything new I think what was really so unusual about it was that the court case that they cited it was fairly blunt about what their intentions are and is that why people are kind of up in arms about it why so much outrage this time I think that's really the reason there was one group that sort of put out a press release about this legal case it turns out the case came about or the filing was filed geez I think June hey it's been a few months it's been out for a long time this isn't really anything new and even privacy experts privacy attorneys I've spoken to everybody is saying that this really isn't all that okay and if you are using gmail folks who are considering switching to yahoo or hotmail is that going to be a better situation no between gmail and yahoo and whatever microsoft mail service are using hotmail outlook.com whatever it is now we're talking about over 1 billion webmail accounts between those three services alone there's currently only around 2.5 billion people on the internet maybe even a little less so you're talking about a vast vast majority of people who use it the internet who use webmail are on one of those three services right and if you really don't want your email read you stand if this really irks you mm-hmm what are the options paid paid email services not really um are they they're scanning emails too well either they're scanning emails or they're gonna wind up getting subpoenaed by the government and they're going to have to put in a back door there's a lot of stuff out there right now that's unclear one person I spoke to when when privacy attorney told me if you're using an encrypted service that's actually a flag to the government so they may not actually have access to your email but they're going to keep the digital files of it until they do get the encryption unencrypted so uh I don't know chisel and stone maybe he's gonna say snail mail yeah yes postal service should be capitalized I think they really should and one of the interesting things is is that you know even though the US Postal Service is run by the government it has a you know 200 plus year history of more or less privacy in physical mail communications and the laws that govern electronic mail don't have those uh those regulations in place so if you're really really concerned and you must do things electronically talk to your congressional representative right and go stock up on some stamps maybe Oh lot of stamps set thanks so much thank you for inside scoop I'm semi does thanks for watching