This is like staying you should stop trusting the supermarket to not poison your food and to instead trust the smaller supermarket to not do it or to just grow your own food.
It’s not practical to not trust anyone and maintain a functional life. The real insight should be at regulating tech companies so they can’t do this anymore.
Email is a utility and should be regulated like one. The power company can’t just shut your house off because you tweeted something bad but for some reason tech companies can do effectively this.
>it’s not practical to not trust anyone and maintain a functional life.
I'd say it's very practical to not exchange medical information over an insecure channel. I don't email naked pictures of myself or even worse share pictures of a child's genitals in some google drive folder anyone can copy or share. my life is perfectly functional. Anyone who deals with email should treat any email they write like they're public, because there's always one dude who copies some entire chain into a reply or forwards something to a hundred random people that weren't supposed to get it.
When you mail something like this you don't even know if the doctor or the secretary opens them. If they're immediately backed up to some remote server now some tech worker has access to naked pictures of your kid. You can't request to delete that information, there's no ownership. That's a completely insane way to treat your most sensitive data.
For tele-medicine there's strict regulations on the safety of apps and how patient data are treated. Consult doctors through one of those. I'm not even sure if it's technically legal for a doctor to interact with patient data as described in the article.
The majority of people these days have their photos backed up to cloud services which happens without any user action other than taking the photo itself.
I don’t think there is any user error here. The user used the services and devices how they are meant to be used and google majorly messed up.
the complaint was sent to multiple agencies, including the SEC. This is clearly stated in the CNN article (which Schneier also links to) already. Even if the detail that it was also sent to SEC were new, it'd still be a dupe. Even if it was entirely new complaint, a 4 sentence blogpost saying that other media has reported something isn't the thing to submit to HN over the original source.
> This is like staying you should stop trusting the supermarket to not poison your food and to instead trust the smaller supermarket to not do it or to just grow your own food.
More like, have alternatives ready and know what to do to avoid downtime if your main supermarket randomly permabans you for accidentally losing a receipt between purchase and exit, or having unaccounted for bottle of coke in your backpack that you bought at another store, or just looking sus. Or yes maybe it's found to be poisoning food. Fairly reasonable to be prepared.
> Email is a utility and should be regulated like one.
I want less barriers to operating my own email if I want it, having to get a license and such is the opposite of the goal. Maybe that's not what you mean though.
Generally regulating anything is a tradeoff. It helps established monopolies and prevents competition.
> Generally regulating anything is a tradeoff. It helps established monopolies and prevents competition.
How is this relevant when discussing Gmail of all things? When was the last time they had an actual competitor with some market share (outside corporate email), Yahoo! Mail?
are you aware how legislation works? you regulate a category as a whole, not randomly pick a specific company and write laws just for it.
if you regulate alphabet in particular, that would send everyone a message that this is now the "officially approved" provider. no others are regulated, after all! it would only increase the barrier to competition.
competition is a good thing. currently, thanks to email+DNS being open protocols, there are no barriers to operating e-mail for your own domain or providing it as a service. as a result, plenty of profitable providers (fastmail, aws) between which users can seamlessly switch.
It’s not practical to not trust anyone and maintain a functional life. The real insight should be at regulating tech companies so they can’t do this anymore.
Email is a utility and should be regulated like one. The power company can’t just shut your house off because you tweeted something bad but for some reason tech companies can do effectively this.