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Google Businesses The Internet Privacy

Google Never Forgets 290

Posted by Zonk from the elephant-like dept.
downsize writes "CNN.com is running an article that provides some insight into how long Google stores our search, email and overall web activity and posits that it 'could prove a tempting target for abuse.' From the article: 'Some don't see Google's long memory as a bad thing. Weinstein doesn't think so. "There's really no good reason to hold onto that information for more than a few months," he said. "They seem to think that because their motives are pure that everything is OK and they can operate on a trust basis. History tells us that is not the case."' In regards to Google's email service, Gmail, Google may find themselves with many upset users due to 'a 1986 law [that] gives less protection from government searches to messages more than six months old...Even when a user deletes a message it may remain on company servers, according to the Gmail privacy policy.' Same goes for POP mail, just because you download it off the server, it's not 'out of Google's long memory'."
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Google Never Forgets More

Google Never Forgets

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  • International laws? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by team99parody ( 880782 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @04:32PM (#12718093) Homepage
    I think some european countries have a lot stronger privacy rules, including rules saying that companies doing business there need to delete almost all records on someone if they request it.

    Does google do business in those countries, and does it follow their laws?

    • Re:International laws? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by buro9 ( 633210 ) <`moc.9orub' `ta' `divad'> on Friday June 03, 2005 @04:40PM (#12718171) Homepage
      "I think some european countries have a lot stronger privacy rules, including rules saying that companies doing business there need to delete almost all records on someone if they request it."

      I signed up for the Napster trial and it asked for my credit card... fair enough I though... "if I use the service I'll be paying for it, and if not I can remove it".

      When the trial ended I decided not to keep it... I wasn't impressed, not least with the gaping holes in their catalogue (EMI).

      So I cancelled that, and discovered that I couldn't clear my credit card details!

      Napster.co.uk is a UK site, the company are registered here too and have a VAT number, etc.

      Yet upon contacting their customer services, I was told that because the servers are in the US, that this falls under US law, and then told that I was not covered by the UK Data Protection Act, EU Data Protection measures... and finally, that they couldn't delete the credit card data as "it is needed for US tax returns".

      Quite how the US govt' needs details on a credit card that has not been involved in a monetary transaction is beyond.

      I call bullshit... but this is when you discover that Data Protection laws are worth shit unless there are ways to easily activate them.

      I still don't know the next step in nuking my credit card details and having my data deleted.

      • Re:International laws? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Husgaard ( 858362 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @05:12PM (#12718475)
        This is probably not legal in your country.

        I know of court rulings in Denmark that have stated that it is not legal to send personal data to the US to avoid the restrictions of the local personal data protection law. The UK laws on personal data protection are almost the same as in Denmark.

        If I was you and wanted to pursue this, I would - after having tried to settle this amicably with Napster.co.uk - complain to the UK Information Commissioner [informatio...ner.gov.uk].

        If readers in other european countries have similar problems, please check the list of national data protection offices [eu.int].

      • You tax cheat! Pay your goddamn US taxes already.
      • most credit cards these days allow you to generate a "temporary number" for sites like napster or paypal, and put X amount of cash in there, as low as $1. the account evaporates after 24 hours or whatever. this sort of thing sounds ideal for dealing with napster.
      • They were breaking the law. Data cannot be given to other countries without adequate data protection laws. See Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].

        Now, this is normally overlooked because it would be quite inconvenient to stop transferring information to America, but it is still against the law.

        You know, you should never believe what a company says. There is a free trading standards hotline to ring. It is worth talking to them. They have your interests in mind, and they know (and uphold) the law.

    • Re:International laws? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ArielMT ( 757715 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @04:47PM (#12718245) Homepage Journal
      Does it really matter? It's on the Internet, so it's accessible from any country.

      Just ask USA-based Linspire, Inc., if it matters. (Microsoft forced the company, then known as LindowsOS, Inc., to stop doing business in Benelux and with Benelux citizens -- no matter where in the world they had addresses -- under their former name.) The 'Net and absurdity-friendly countries mean that the court system of one country can be used against a 'Net-based company in another country, even if none of the parties involved have physical presences in the one country.

      • WTF is Benelux (Score:2, Insightful)

        by emseabrown ( 788368 )
        took a quick google, I thought for a moment that a new nation had formed that I had never heard of.

        Benelux apparently stands for

        BElguim, NEtherlands, and LUXembourg.

    • Yes, EU privacy rules lean towards the private citizen, not the corporate world. Having said that, there is an EU directive being negotiated to require ISPs to retain communications meta-data for one year; there had been efforts to make it a three or four year period, but there were shut down.

      Google does operate in the EU, so it would have to play ball. The question is, has anybody actually asked Google to delete their personal data? If they did, how would they obtain proof that Google had in fact deleted
    • Do you have anything more to say on the topic than "I think some european countries have a lot stronger privacy rules?"

      That isn't really a lot to go on.
  • I, for one, am partly scared by my Google overlords who read my email.

  • Get over it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Brandon K ( 888791 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @04:33PM (#12718104)
    This is all something we accept when we click "OK" to Google's TOS, without even reading it. If you don't like it, you can always use some other alternative, no guarantees that it will be able to match up with what Google can provide.

    With that said, who is to say other companies don't do the same thing? You honestly think once you delete an email with another service, say, Hotmail, it is instantly evaporated off their servers? Of course not.

    • Re:Get over it (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Totally unenforcable.

      Just because some fine print says that Slashdot owns all the pr0n on your machine and your firstborn kid on one of their terms of use pages doesn't mean it's true. There are major limits on what such clicky-agreeements actually can hold up legally.

      • Re:Get over it (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Adrilla ( 830520 ) *
        But I doubt this is in that unenforcable range. This is information held on their servers with info that you've put on there willingly under a TOS agreement that you agreed to. I don't see in this instance how it'd be unenforcable.

    • Re:Get over it (Score:3, Informative)

      by m50d ( 797211 )
      We do switch to other alternatives. But the people who blindly click though need to know about such things. There are good reasons not to use Google, this is one of them.
      • No standard exists for purging paper transactions. If you send someone a letter, that letter is out of your control and might be retained for a few lifetimes.

        Do you have any evidence that Google is the only business that's retaining this information?

        Storage is cheap.

        Ask your employer how long they retain your email. Ask you ISP how long they keep your email, etc. (I found out that mine -- a national provider -- keeps the accounts of ex-customers -- that's ex-customers -- active, retains their email and

    • I'm willing to bet that few people consider the fact that as data that is available (or archived), it is also discoverable in a legal proceeding. That may not mean much at the moment people sign up, but under the right circumstances, it could be disasterous.
    • I don't see any TOS, or any notice on their search page which states any terms at all... I'm not saying I agree or disagree but I think you should get your facts straight.
    • With that said, who is to say other companies don't do the same thing? You honestly think once you delete an email with another service, say, Hotmail, it is instantly evaporated off their servers?

      So why does hotmail pretend to delete your account if you have been inactive for a while? Just to harass you?

      Of course not.

      The world is filled with imoral creeps, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something about them.

  • History is a bad thing? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ichthus ( 72442 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @04:33PM (#12718109) Homepage
    I can understand the concern over storing deleted email. But, keeping caches of web content is a bad thing? Some (like me) would argue that deleting old, cached content would be analogous to burning books. The more history, the better if you ask me.

    • googlebot also respects robots.txt... so you can keep it away if you'd like.

      web.archive.org has old copies of sites, with far more of an intent to long-term-archive web content, if someone's worried about things staying around longer than they intended.
    • But the problem with that is, you end up keeping very old, stagnant material, along with very old, very useful material.

      With the web designed as an ad-hoc, mindless data drop system, it's virtually guarenteed we'll be holding on to those pathetic GeoCities websites until long past the days of our deaths.

      This brings up a bunch of problems with the web in general. Dead links being a huge problem; if PageRank or anything like it is supposed to chug through all of the links on old websites, along with th

  • The safest assumption... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mbrother ( 739193 ) * <<ude.oywu> <ta> <rehtorbm>> on Friday June 03, 2005 @04:34PM (#12718115) Homepage
    Everyone should always assume that anything they post on the internet will be somewhere forever. Any email they send or receive might well be duplicated somewhere else as well.

    I guess we're going to find out if things like google searches are going to bite people in the future or not. This feels like Patriot Act stuff to me, potentially, they way that libraries and book stores can be required to provide information about your reading habits. As a writer, I really don't like it. What if I want to write a book featuring terrorist villians, and do a lot of "suspicious" searches doing my research?

    It's troubling to me.
    • Agreed. I, the anonymous coward, have said some pretty dumb stuff over time and it'll be there... Forever. I'm going to have to live with that.

      Wait, no I don't. /me screams "Honey, I'm going to Wal-Mart to buy a gun and a single bullet. Be back later" /she screams "Bring back milk!"
    • There can be worse assumptions than you being a terrorist. I checked out lots of murder mysteries for my mother, and lots of romance novels for my wife...

      Once the Patriot Act people get ahold of my records, they might assume I am a GAY MURDERER!

      • "Once the Patriot Act people get ahold of my (library) records, they might assume I am a GAY MURDERER!"

        They already do, 'cause that's what your Tivo told them. :-)

    • Time to start using encryption for everything. The technology is there, we just need to get people to bother to use it.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re:The safest assumption... (Score:4, Funny)

          by DeathFlame ( 839265 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @05:03PM (#12718406)
          What you can't read encrypted search results?

          www.google.com

          Search: Y%KjkK7u0(l

          Did you mean: Y%kjKK7u0(L?

        • ... and how exactly is that going to work with things like Google searches?

          Well, you could always use an anonymous proxy if you're that concerned ... You could also block the cookie that allows google to track a user and their past requests.

          If you do block the cookie, and if your ISP only keeps your IP address info for six months or less, then Google or anyone else will never be able to link the IP requesting the search back to who you are after this time.

          Anyway, what the hell are you searching for th
    • I agree to an extent.

      Essentially if you don't have a reason to keep a bunch of data around, it's probably prudent to get rid of it. There is real potiential for this to kick Google in the ass. If they have a policy of co-operating with law enforcment investigations (which they do) there is the chance that the results of some potientially over-reaching investigation leaks out.
      • The way market forces work, some other up-and-coming search engine ought to be able to bite into google's share by advertising a better privacy policy. Part of the problem here, as another poster suggested, is that google is so popular and makes for one-stop-shopping for investigators.

        And before someone pops and says something like "You don't anything to worry about if you haven't done anything wrong," who really wants to explain their google searches to anyone else, let alone federal agents? That's tro
        • And before someone pops and says something like "You don't anything to worry about if you haven't done anything wrong," who really wants to explain their google searches to anyone else, let alone federal agents? That's trouble I could do without. Perhaps it isn't very common, but under the Patriot Act, I believe it's secret how often it does occur.

          Exactly. And it's not a question of whether you've done anything wrong. The real question is whether someone at a law enforcement agency thinks it looks as if

    • Well you're pretty correct in your assertions. Still I would argue that, at least for things like email, it shouldn't be assumed that my mail will be around forever. Think about if your post offices kept copies of all the mail you received, even after you had thrown it away. I think the central argument is indeed about things like the PATROIT act. It's the fact that not only you or even google might be reading your mail but also your government, or the government where the servers are stored.
      • I have email from other people from the early 1990s. I have a lot of my own outgoing email going back several years. And that's just me -- I don't know if my providers archive backups that might include email. Certainly lots of things get deleted, but it's probably not safe to assume any one particular piece of email you might find embarrsing will never resurface.

        There's probably a version of Murphy's Law there. Something like, "If there's one email that will damage you most, that is the one that will
      • Think about if your post offices kept copies of all the mail you received, even after you had thrown it away.

        They do. [slashdot.org] At least, they keep an image of the outside of the envelope.

    • Everyone should always assume that anything they post on the internet will be somewhere forever.

      No kidding. And this predates the Web. You'd be surprised at what people were posting on Usenet back in the '80s... If you post or email it, assume someone's kept a copy somewhere.

      Eric
      William Shatner: Nameless Cereal Box Celebrity [ericgiguere.com]
    • Everyone should always assume that anything they post on the internet will be somewhere forever

      The problem with that assumption is when things change in your life that you didn't expect. I've been operating under the everything-will-be-on-the-internet-forever model for most of my online life and things have been fine. But recently I've become a teacher. Now there's a lot of stuff I don't care about my friends/family/co-workers reading... but my students? That's a whole other story.

      -Colin [colingregorypalmer.net]
  • They're finally doing it, they start building up animosity in the world of computer geekdom. Make them hate Google. Then they will become weak and fall to the mighty power of MSN Search!
  • I've tried sending them an email with a list of posts to be deleted as per their requirements. They just don't respond.

    I'll probably trying sending certified mail with a list of the posts and see if I have any better luck.

  • Getting it straight (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 03, 2005 @04:36PM (#12718130)
    Keep in mind Google's motto is: "Do No Evil". Making it possible for others to do evil is thus acceptable under the terms of the motto.
    • Cosmo: I cannot kill my friend.
      [to his henchman]
      Cosmo: Kill my friend.

    • Keep in mind Google's motto is: "Do No Evil".

      Yes, it's a good thing they have that motto -- otherwise who knows what sort of evil things they might do?

      But no, they say they're not evil, so there's clearly nothing to worry about.
    • Keep in mind Google's motto is: "Do No Evil".

      So is everybody - even if they go to war and blow up buildings - its never evil its always necessary.

  • Free (Score:4, Insightful)

    by slapout ( 93640 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @04:37PM (#12718147)
    Google is allowing you to use their equipment to do searches and you're surprised they're keeping the results?!

  • Cookies on www.google.com (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 03, 2005 @04:39PM (#12718153)
    Why does Google set cookies on www.google.com when you access your gmail account? For the purpose of session tracking setting cookies only on gmail.google.com is sufficient.

    Obviously, it's done the searches you later do on www.google.com can be tracked. Don't believe in that "we do no evil" crap, Google is to be trusted no more than any other for-profit corporation.

  • 0h, n03s! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by guitaristx ( 791223 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @04:40PM (#12718163) Journal
    That means that they know about my 1ll3g4l h4x0r1n9 correspondence! I thought it was all secret!</clueless_noob>

    This really isn't a scary thing to me, since I don't use gmail (or google, for that matter) for anything illegal. That doesn't mean that I'm keen on spilling my email-archive guts to the entire world, but if it must happen, it'd be embarrassing at worst. More than likely, my email will elicit the same reaction we see when we try to post too quickly to a late-breaking /. story:
    Nothing to see here, please move along.

    The rule of thumb here (or rule of wrist, if you're a fan of The Boondock Saints [imdb.com]) is:
    Don't do stupid/illegal/dangerous stuff online - someone's always watching!

    • It doesn't matter whether activity is legal or not, because legitimate data is useful to computer criminals, too. If I knew every mailing list password, web site password e-mail verification, bank account website confirmation, credit card order, etc. was duplicated on the e-mail provider's servers, even after I delete them, that would really piss me off. Delete means delete, not fake delete plus persistent archive.

  • Point and counterpoint (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Todd Knarr ( 15451 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @04:40PM (#12718172) Homepage

    The article may have a point. Of course, that point is it's own counterpoint. How often have people used things like Google's cached copy of data or the Wayback Machine to prove that a company really did say or claim something after they'd removed or altered the claim and denied ever saying/claiming the original? Google's long memory cuts both ways, and I think it's too useful for keeping track of things to give it up just because it might track my things. And of course it can also be used to counter people who might claim I changed my tune or concealed something when I didn't.

  • If I'm worried about people reading my email or keeping it after I delete it, I'm going to run my own encrypted mail server, or pay someone who I trust to run one.

  • I'm all for privacy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ghettoboy22 ( 723339 ) <scott.a.johnson@gmail.com> on Friday June 03, 2005 @04:45PM (#12718223) Homepage
    But really, if I wasn't keeping the email on Google's servers, it would be on my own hard drive, which if the Government is going to serve a search warrant on Google, they could just as easily raid my house.

    Yes, you could say my hard drive would be encrypted, or the Goverment could subpoena Google rather than serve a search warrant, but then, you shouldn't be doing anything illegal through a public company anyway, let alone in plain-text.

    In summary, I find Gmail's interface and features worth the risk.
    • Not just as easily. With Google, they can get lots of people's email all at once, and perhaps even perform a Google search on everyone's email at once.

      Now, I still use Gmail, because I also find the features worth the risk, but that might change. I don't use some of Google's other privacy-invading features, like the PageRank indicator on the Googlebar (IE only, anwyay) or the Web accelerator.

  • Thank you (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Strange Ranger ( 454494 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @04:48PM (#12718253)
    slashdot so much for another non-news article intended to spark heated discussion.

    On today's front page so far we've had:

    OSS: Europe vs. the USA

    Gaming: Nintendo vs. Sony

    Gaming: PCs vs. Consoles

    Gaming: Sex & Gender vs. Gender

    Platforms: Apple vs. Intel combined with MAC vs. Linux.

    Google: New feature

    Google: Owns all your data, again.

    Linux & Apache: Used by popular (real) news site (wow).


    Next up:
    Flames vs. Yawns vs. News, the slashdot version of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

    Sure, this is a troll, flame whatever. But isn't that what we do here lately?

    • I think that pretty much sums up Slashdot well at this point. I'm sure your post and mine will get modded into oblivion but I wholeheartedly agree with you.

      ~S

  • Statistics (Score:5, Interesting)

    by KagatoLNX ( 141673 ) <kagato@s o u j a .net> on Friday June 03, 2005 @04:49PM (#12718264) Homepage
    Most of Google's magic is really data mining the semantic data from the Internet.

    Gmail is nothing more than an attempt at getting a massive corpus of data on which to let their algorithms loose.

    I really think that, while there is potential for abuse, this is really the only way to tackle their problem space. After all, Google doesn't really rank web sites, people do. It's just that Google has some really clever ways for determining that people liked a web site.

    Sometimes it relates to webs of links, sometimes it relates to combinations of words, but Google's software doesn't deal in semantics--only algorithmically generating statistics from the data generated by people.

    I don't worry so much about Google, I worry about our future AI overlords. Although, if a truly scalable Artificial Intelligence ever gets Internet access, I fear it has the potential to know us better than we do.
    • Most of Google's magic is really data mining the semantic data from the Internet.

      Great, so when the Googlebot takes over the world it's going to do it using the grammar it learned from a bunch of 12-year-olds.

      Just great.
    • Although, if a truly scalable Artificial Intelligence ever gets Internet access, I fear it has the potential to know us better than we do.

      But will it know love?

  • It's still quite private (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tehcrazybob ( 850194 ) <ben.geek@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Friday June 03, 2005 @04:51PM (#12718288)
    Google caching web pages for decades is really an interesting practice. I know I have found sites and images cached in Google that have long since gone from their original locations. They are like ghosts in the night, or like finding an empty treasure chest that wasn't on the map.

    As for caching email, though, I don't see why everyone gets so uptight over privacy. Your emails are still quite private. I doubt there are many people at Google with access to the information, and even if they could read all your email I have to think it would be a singularly boring pursuit.

    The US Government can still look at your mail, though. So? If you don't do anything illegal it won't matter. These people already know your tax information. They know your social security number. They know all the places you have lived and all the cars you have owned. They know all the crimes you have been convicted for. They know all of this because of services they provide.

    If you're doing nothing wrong, it's unlikely the government will request your emails. And even if they do, you're safe. They aren't going to care about personal anecdotes, and they already have most of the information they would find. On the other hand, if you actually are doing something illegal, I would hope you had a better way to communicate about it than email. There are lots of programs which offer encrypted instant messaging. There's a plugin for Gaim to use it, and there are personal network clients like WASTE with encrypted chat capabilities. You could even create a Yahoo account with false information. So be illegal on those, and not on Gmail.

  • Sorry (Score:3, Funny)

    by JustOK ( 667959 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @04:59PM (#12718364) Journal
    http://slashdot.org/search.pl?topic=217 [slashdot.org] Sorry, search is down at the moment. Until it's back up, you may wish to search Slashdot through Google:

  • Wash yourself (Score:4, Informative)

    by lucidvein ( 18628 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @05:00PM (#12718375) Homepage
    Time to clean up your cookies between searching and using other Google services...

    http://www.imilly.com/google-cookie.htm [imilly.com]

    Using this "your Google GUID will be reset to all zeroes, making you effectively anonymous to Google - all the while automatically keeping your saved preferences (such as language, filtering, number of results, etc)."
  • The only way my data is private at all at Google, especially with such a Big Brother law, is if it's encrypted, as well as its index, only decrypted on executing a search query, with all plaintext logs discarded after a few minutes - and warranteed private in Google's TOS.

    Why does the government get to look at my data after 6 months, but it's so hard to get them to respond to FOIA requests within 6 months (or at all) when the info is sensitive? Isn't this related to this week's Supreme Court decision that
    • The only way my data is private at all at Google,

      Since Google's forte is indexing/cross-referencing/etc. publicly accessible information, I would assume that Google is the wrong place to put anything that should remain private.

      It's probably more like doing for ordinary mortals what has been done to the "private" papers of Washington, Lincoln, and the likes. There is also a big effective difference between something that stores ALL available information and something which is highly "selective". If I know
      • I agree with you about several principles, but even there, I disagree about their implications.

        Yes, Google's "forte" is searching public info, but that's because they've only recently offered searching private info. There's little difference to the search system - in fact, since private info is submitted, rather than spidered, it's easier to search the private info more comprehensively. In the transition, people haven't considered that their private info could become public. At least not enough to stop the
  • if CIA/NSA & FBI Were working AT google, as full-time employees, on their staff. I should go grab my tin-foil hat right ? Well, this all reminds me of another story about the two dozen military specialists in psychologic operations were employed at CNN.

    "Psyops personnel, soldiers and officers, have been working in CNN's headquarters in Atlanta through our program 'Training With Industry,'" said Major Thomas Collins of the US Army Information Service in a telephone interview last Friday. "They worked

  • Google is the memory of the global village (Score:3, Insightful)

    by vrimj ( 750402 ) on Friday June 03, 2005 @05:12PM (#12718480)
    A lack of history is an invention of big city. Anyone who has lived in a small town knows what it means to have your history (and that of your neighbors) known.
    In some ways this is an example of techonlogy bringing us full circle.
  • Isn't this the nature of the internet in general? Almost all data uploaded to the internet is copied and stored elsewhere across several thousands of computer.

    For example, if I take my own website down after running it for several years, can I really blame anyone but myself for residual data left behind in caches and search engines?

    Once you put data on the internet, don't ever count on being able to completely remove it. Someone, somewhere will always have a copy of it in some form.
  • Sorry but I haven't read the article as I've just come in pissed from the pub.

    But WTF do you think will happen when a PUBLICALLY LISTED COMPANY has access to this sort of data ? It's a marketroids ultimate wet dream.

    So I for one don't care what Googles stated privacy policy is. This can be overturned in one board meeting by one "entity" with enough shares (remember: as far as "the Law" (tm) is concerned Corporations are people too)

    In the wrong hands Google will become the ultimate Stasi machine. The s
  • Oops, we didn't really mean to say, "Don't be evil." We meant to say, "Be evil." Sorry about that. Now up against the wall, you gullible geeks!
    _____________

    April 6, 2004, Associated Press, by Michael Liedtke:
    Wayne Rosing [a Google vice president] said there will be an information firewall separating Google's search engine from Gmail. "We don't use the data collected on one service," he said, "to enhance another."
    ____________

    On July 1, 2004, Google modified their main privacy policy to comply with a new Ca
  • This is one of the single most important issues that will come up over the next decade with respect to technology. With computers hosting and controlling everything, it's part of their inherent nature to accumulate all the information they can.. and NEVER delete it.

    I've said from the beginning, nothing is free. If you use Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo or any of those "free" services, one primary thing you're losing is autonomy and privacy and security. All your correspondence, the content of messages, who your

  • The article says that "a 1986 law gives less protection from government searches to messages more than six months old." This is misleading. IANAL, but here's my understanding of the law:

    Under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, email that is still in transmission receives a higher level of protection than email that the recipient has opened and has left in storage on a remote computer. If you have unopened email on, say, Gmail, and it has been in electronic storage for 180 days or less, then

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