Confidential Mode Will Keep You Gmail’s Data Private But It’s Not Enough

by Muhammad Irfan Raza
Published: Last Updated on
Confidential Mode Will Keep You Gmail's Data Private But It's Not Enough

Gmail got new design in past April and it became default for everyone in July.

Now Gmail gets ‘Confidential Mode’ which is now available for mobile devices.

Confidential Mode Will Keep You Gmail’s Data Private But It’s Not Enough.

Confidential Mode allows you to keep your data private, once you have turned on the mode for a specific email, you can set an expiration date and passcode for the email and in this way, you can restrict access to the email either in the web or using mobile.

Recipients of these confidential emails won’t be able to copy, paste, download, print, forward the message and attachments will be disabled.

That doesn’t stop anyone from taking a screenshot of your emails.

Google said:

CONFIDENTIAL MODE HELPS PREVENT THE RECIPIENTS FROM ACCIDENTALLY SHARING YOUR EMAIL, IT DOESN’T PREVENT RECIPIENTS FROM TAKING SCREENSHOTS OR PHOTOS OF YOUR MESSAGES OR ATTACHMENTS. RECIPIENTS WHO HAVE MALICIOUS PROGRAMS ON THEIR COMPUTER MAY STILL BE ABLE TO COPY OR DOWNLOAD YOUR MESSAGES OR ATTACHMENTS.

Digital privacy advocacy group EFF(Electronic Frontier Foundation) said this new feature is not secure at all, might even lend the user a false sense of security. A confidential mode is not end-to-end encrypted, Google could, in fact, read your messages.

In addition, the EFF said when you set an expiration date after the set period expired messages do not disappear from your sent mail, they are actually retrievable. If you use SMS passcode, you might need to give Google recipient’s phone number. That means that Google now has another way to get personal data, an email connected to a phone number.

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