Networks in Government Spying
We live in an age where many of us are concerned about the government spying on the world’s communications. Though many choose to ignore or do not believe that government agencies like the NSA record their calls, messages, emails, etc., the disconcerting truth is that these agencies can and do collect this information from us. It is a fact that email services like Google store copies of emails sent by its users for undisclosed reasons. However, most people are not aware that they save copies of emails sent to Gmail users from users of other email services.
Benjamin Hill, a man who has run his own email server for more than a decade, was surprised to find out that even though he puts in the effort to keep his conversations private, Google still has copies of his emails that he’s sent to Gmail users. By sorting through his past emails, he concluded that Google has copies of 57% of his personal emails just because he sent them to Gmail users. This situation actually poses a networks problem. Google has the ability to store a copy of any email sent to a Gmail user regardless of what email service the other person is using; so, they could very easily have the majority of a complete network of all emails sent (at least in countries where Gmail is the prominent email service). With over 900 million Gmail users, it is extremely unlikely for a person who does not use Gmail to be in a complete network that is isolated completely from another network that has at least one person who uses Gmail. If these networks represent business listservs, then with just one mass email where everyone in that particular group is CC’d, it only takes one person who uses Gmail for Gmail to have a copy of that particular mail, which really makes us wonder exactly how much of the world’s emails Google has saved.
Source: https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours