This is a common refrain you hear from any company that is facing a data
breach or violation of your data, whether involuntary or otherwise. We have come to take that statement as more of
a marketing speak or damage control PR, than anything substantive. The phrase signals defensive stand of the
speaker.
Very recently we heard
this from Microsoft. The Hotmail service provider, allegedly, read the emails of one of
its ex-employees suspected of unauthorized sharing of company’s sensitive code
with outsiders, using Microsoft’s own email and other data storage services! (WTF?)
Hurricane in a teacup
It was interesting to hear the commotion from EEF,
and a raging online discussions
about Microsoft’s “frisking” of user’s emails.
Some people likened access of email by Microsoft to breaking a trust
that has been taken for granted. Perhaps, in all this hue and cry, we may have forgotton that it is we, the users, who have given our consent to the tech companies (via ToS fine print) to peek into our
inboxes or sniff at our outgoing emails if they so wish.
In fact Microsoft wanted to drive home this point home when its
Deputy General Counsel stated (in the blog post referred above) that “Courts do not, however, issue
orders authorizing someone to search themselves” (emphasis is mine). Clearly
the company asserts its ownership of your emails and related
data as “their” property! The software giant believes it is not just a carrier
of your messages as you always believed, but owns it as well.
Consider that USPS, by law, needs a warrant to read your
mails. Private companies, however do not. They get this authority from the
contract you agreed to while signing up for their services. All for the convenience of a free email
services and gigabytes of free storage. In return we do not seem to mind if our
messages are read or acted upon.
We accepted this slowly. First it was algorithms pioneered
by Google that read our emails in exchange for serving more tailored ads. We
tacitly agreed to the artificial distinction between a person reading our email against
an algorithm designed by a person to read our emails.
Back to the basics
Why not go for a paid email service (think Centmail-now
defunct) where you pay for every email you send and forbid service provider
to read your email without a warrant? No I am not talking about paid secure
email services using state-of-the-art encryption to protect your mail from
snooping or hacking. Rather an email
service where the sender pays to send a
message in exchange for the protection of law. Granted you will be deprived
of the filtered ads for your perfect vacation at unbelievable prices. But the search engines would do that gladly and there are apps for that.
Such a service would greatly reduce (if not eliminate) the massive
scourge of SPAM choking our networks and inboxes, and generating all the headaches that
come with it- SPAM firewalls, SPAM detection and filtering, whitelist &
blacklist, domain & IP blocking. It
will also give a better control over malware spreading recklessly through emails.
Paying for sending billions of emails would take a good
amount of air out of SPAM and Malware economy. It would also make it easier to
track the sources of malicious attacks that started from emails.
Looking beyond Emails
This kind of an approach would re-trigger the old protest, echoing
phrases like “stifling innovation.” Such protests presupposes that innovation does not have a leg to stand on unless it
makes its services free. The reality is we are too hooked to things that come
with the label “FREE.”
Interestingly the Gen X and the Millennium crowd do not
treat email the same way as boomers do. Email for the digital generation is not
a primary vehicle of connecting with each other. For them mobile messaging and social media is the current gold (ask
WhatsApp and a bunch of VCs investing heavily into messaging apps).
Email has attained maturity and has become a de-facto formal means of
communication like its predecessor, the postal mail. There is no reason to barter
away your fundamental rights of protection against search and seizure, for a free
service and suffer abuses or breaches of privacy in return ... or to act outraged
if the “free” service provider goes beyond your presumptions.
