March 9, 2012

How Secure is Gmail data within Google?

All of you might know that all your emails are stored in Gmail.  Can the Google employees working in Google read your products ?


All your private & confidential emails are stored in the Gmail mailbox. But are these mails secure?

Can a Google employee working on Google products read your emails? 

The truth is "Yes" , a small number of Gmail related engineers have access to the servers as a matter of necessity to do their jobs. Christopher Nguyen, responsible for Google apps operations at Google said about this Quora
A small number of GMail-related engineers have access to the servers as a matter of necessity to do their jobs; a very small number of people actually access the contents as a matter of necessity to do their jobs, and even then, almost always only the associated metadata. 

The rest have to file a request and justify any access they ever need, which is extremely rare. All have to sign paperwork re users' privacy at the risk of dismissal & legal action, knowing that whatever they do is discoverable. And ultimately, an internal culture of respecting users' privacy helps keep one another in check.

So the risk is never zero, but minimized by the factors above.


Google serves ads in Gmail which are triggered based on the mail you are reading. Evidently it is Google bot that is scanning your emails for relevant keywords. 


With a small hope to shift some Gmail users to use Hotmail, they are pointing this out 


Some email services, like Gmail, actually read the contents of your mail (both sent and received, even if you aren’t a Gmail user but just sending to someone who is) in order to decide what kind of ads to serve up to you. They may call it “scanning” and attempt to equate it with less invasive activities like “checking for spam” but it’s quite different. For you, and the people you send mail to, it’s not spam, it’s personal.


 The Microsoft team also released a video titled the Gmail Man highlighting this behavior of Google to its users. 



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