Re: [Shutup] [ietf-smtp] Proposed Charter for the "SMTP Headers Unhealthy To User Privacy" WG (fwd)

[Chris Lewis <[e-mail]>]

On 12/01/2015 06:59 PM, Ted Lemon wrote:
> Tuesday, Dec 1, 2015 6:52 PM John C Klensin wrote:
>> Suppose that,
>> instead, the question was closer to: "if a user had a serious
>> desire to protect her location, especially against pervasive
>> surveillance by state actors and too-curious message recipients,
>> how would she do that with existing systems?"
>
> John, I think that I already explained why this isn't a good question to ask.   We don't want privacy just for people who think in advance, "hm, email in general isn't private, and I know that I am going to need privacy, so I will use this other service in order to gain privacy."   We want the email to already have been private when the need for it to be private arises, without the user who needs this privacy having a mental model that would allow the aforementioned questions to be asked, to say nothing of being answered.

The reality is that if the user wasn't already conscious of their 
privacy and striving to preserve it through continuous vigilance, 
they've already completely outed themselves.

For example, if you're expecting to use a nicknamed gmail account, that 
email conversation with Amazon with your credit card info or Facebook 
with your real name last year, has outed that gmail account forever - 
gmail hides received lines remember?

It's far better to train them in the reality of what they need to do to 
preserve their own privacy, than the impossibility of trying to 
privacy-protect everything (and still have something anybody wants to use).