Google surprised is he reading your emails? You should not be

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I should not be surprised, but I am.

I headed for a friend at work, angry. "Gmail lets people read our bloody e-mails!" I exclaimed. He tapped on his keyboard, read a few lines from the Wall Street Journal article about it, and looked up at me, placidly. "Well, it's too late to do anything," he said. "We are too deep, there is no turning back." With an impbadive smile, he turned to his computer. Needless to say, I was upset by his attention factor (zero).

Gmail, just like my friend, certainly does not think it's a big deal. In fact, he seems rather perplexed about the whole problem. He reacted to the news with a blog post baduring us that keeping our data secure is a "top priority" and that for people to read our emails, they must pbad a "multi-step review process" and meet two criteria: 1) they must be honest about who they are, and 2) they must tell Gmail why they use our data.

I do not know about you, but when I read that, I felt like tearing off my hair. Because I did not really feel better than Gmail know who reads my emails and what they use them for. And me, the person to whom emails really matter? Why do not I know that? Why did not I say? Why did not I have a choice?

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I do not agree with my friend that we are "too deep" and that we can not do anything about it. This overwhelming feeling of apathy towards privacy must stop. But nothing seems to be able to permeate the social psyche – Assange, Snowden, Cambridge Analytica – and now an organization we trust to store personal information by handing them over to randoms. Still no flaccs.

Of course, some people get discouraged in an editorial, on Twitter, or even in major publications. But everyone seems to be in denial, scrolling through their IG feeds, while some chuckles may well watch their bad photos in their articles sent by Gmail without their consent.

I feel compelled to disclose here that companies that scan / read our e-mails have policies that require personal emails to delete. I would also like to point out, however, that policies are pretty bloody useless if they are not enforced and there are no legal consequences for non-compliance with them.

In his completely antiseptic blog, Gmail provided us with information on how to "refuse" people who read our emails (thanks guys). What I would like to know, why on earth have we never been told that we "choose"?

One thing we could do is make a legal requirement for all online businesses, or at least those that contain sensitive and / or personal information (such as email providers and social media) , to properly inform customers about who can access their data. And I do not mean by burying it in a document "terms and conditions" written ambiguously. I mean by having a notification that literally says, "Hey, our staff will read your emails, if you're cool with that, check the box below."

Another thing we could do is make it mandatory for all politicians to reread 1984 when they enter politics. And read it again every year. Maybe if they were a bit scared, they would attack these data-hungry privacy thieves.

Like everyone else, I sold part of my privacy in exchange for the convenience of the modern technological world – my location, when I use Uber, or my name and my city, when I connect me to something from Facebook. What I did not do, is allow people to come into my inbox and discover my life. At least, I did not know that I had allowed that

Claire Thurstans is a chronicler Age