> Recipients of the confidential message will have options to forward, copy, print, and download disabled.
Doesn't seem to be that easy. You're probably not going to get a copy without taking a screenshot, opening up developer tools or digging into your browser's cache.
I checked, you can go to the menu at the top of your browser, and hit File->Save Page As. It took me about 15 seconds. You can also save the page as HTML only, which both prevents any weird clientside tricks that Google might like to try in the future and makes the file more portable.
Assuming you don't want to save the HTML page, you still might not even need to download a separate program to screenshot it. New installs of Firefox just have a button on the toolbar labeled, "Take a Screenshot". It'll grab the entire page without forcing you to do any scrolling, and doesn't require you to know anything about HTML. I tested, and it bypasses all of the security features on confidential emails.
People are arguing that this is designed to prevent accidental sharing, which is a really good point that I think I agree with overall. However, HN is a tech site and I'm seeing comments that say the only way you could beat this is to dig into your developer tools.
If a nontrivial portion of HN users think this service is more secure than it actually is, how much more uninformed are ordinary users? Saving a web page is not going to be a difficult problem for most people in your office to solve. So my objection here would be, Google isn't doing a good enough job of informing even tech-literate people of just how easy this is to circumvent.
A CEO is going to look at this and think, "well, I guess they're doing voodoo magic so most people in my office won't be able to share." The reality is, pretty much anyone in your office who wants to be able to beat this will be able to figure out how to do so.
Doesn't seem to be that easy. You're probably not going to get a copy without taking a screenshot, opening up developer tools or digging into your browser's cache.