Question
Asked 9 October 2013

In the field of email management and security, what would you rather have: 1). Privacy of your email messages or 2). Security of your emails?

Email users want their email messages or email clients to provide high level of privacy as well as good security.

Most recent answer

Taiwo Ayodele
University of Portsmouth
Thanks.
The concept of privacy and security is such a vast and could be applied in several fields.

All Answers (8)

Kami Vaniea
University of Waterloo
Email is one of those security situations where I don't think there really is a large trade-off between privacy and security. If someone else can read my email then I've lost both security and privacy.
The only point I can think of that might separate them is spam detection, where I might view my security (not getting spam or other dangerous email) as more important than my privacy (having an automated service scan the email). However, most security technology has identification mechanisms built in. So for anyone I'm having a secure conversation with I should also know who they are and should be able to easily filter without the need for a spam detector.
A better question might be the trade-off between security and usability. Most secure systems add some element of inconvenience if used correctly. For example I can't use the Gmail web interface anymore since I now encrypt some of my email and Gmail does not support that.
Taiwo Ayodele
University of Portsmouth
Both Privacy and security should be a must have if you can as both are good to mitigate your risks.
But with security and usability, I will not put the two together because usability depend of your as a user even with the example that you gave. There are other mail clients that allow encryption etc.
Natalia G. Miloslavskaya
National Research Nuclear University MEPhI
Both Privacy and security should be a must have. But for my home private email box I prefer privacy while for my working email box I prefer security.
Rodrigo Ruiz
Centro de Tecnologia da Informação Renato Archer
Dear Taiwo, I will share a paper in Intellisys 2015 London. Privacy, Browsers and data leakage with gmail, hotmail and others.
Taiwo Ayodele
University of Portsmouth
In this case both Privacy and Security are must have in order to mitigate your risks. 
Iliescu Dragos
Nuclear NDT Research and Services
Privacy and security are connected in their meaning. Both can be explained by the concepts of trust (see for example https://www.jstor.org/stable/258792?seq=19#page_scan_tab_contents) and justified true believe ( E. Gettier - Justified True Belief - http://fitelson.org/proseminar/gettier.pdf). If the above assumptions are correct, the initial question refers to a much larger context not to email only. Email itself can be understood as a communication channel (here Shannon theory of communication apply, pointing much on the privacy problem), or as information system pointing much on the (system) security aspects.
In conclusion, if user of a mail client is called to respond to the question, he/she wouldn't be able to offer a sound answer as they would not see the 'real' image of the problem, they only will have the belief (it will be for true?) of that.
Taiwo Ayodele
University of Portsmouth
Thanks.
The concept of privacy and security is such a vast and could be applied in several fields.

Similar questions and discussions

Is anyone willing to share email server honey pot data to trace scams?
Question
3 answers
  • Deleted profile
 The internet is a wonderful thing but some people use it as a tool to do crimes which predate the internet such as theft and money laundering and few criminologists have skills in dealing with seven continents and their subgroups of languages, religious beliefs, genders, ages. I heard a talk about comparing epidemiologist with finding risk factors for those behaviors that put computer users at risk for being hacked (characteristics making victimization possible (the action of signaling someone out for cruel or unjust treatment)). Is it possible to work backwords and find geopolitical and economic patterns that might cause a person towards cybercrime . I have three examples, one is the suspected hacking of Sony Pictures America by North Korea as retribution for producing the film The Interview. The second example is the hacking of Estonia by Russia during the evolution and the third is provided in the document below. Peter Norvig at Google gave a talk on computers being able to detect similar images but may not have our taxonomy. I think that we can use Twitter and a database of actual spam messages with their header including IP address. Using a whois database such as senderbase we can find the orgins. A lot of security is reactive once an attack has been aimed at a corporation, even if it gets blocked. What we need to do is to find patterns and I think regional news can help. I hope to have a collection of honeypot email servers which attracts mail from spammers reach out to organizations who have existing honey pot email servers so I can get spam email messages with header intact so I can investigate where they are coming from. One of the ways public private partnerships is that no one wants to be defrauded. I believe as long as we can make personas for why the honeypot got the spam, then we can work with this data and mine it using knime open source, senderbase, whois, online intelligence databases, Mozilla ELK, and apache natural language tools. I know there are also some open source tools through Stanford, Gate, nltk, Microsoft Flow,
The issue of improving information security systems collected in social media portals databases?
Discussion
15 replies
  • Dariusz ProkopowiczDariusz Prokopowicz
What safeguards are necessary for allowing a variety of users to access their customer bio-metrics?
Question
6 answers
  • Srinivasan RamaniSrinivasan Ramani
Biometric IDs and the Risks Involved
India has generated 111,15,84,242 Aadhaar IDs as of Feb 1, 2017, as per the Authority (UIDAI) Website https://uidai.gov.in/new/ Each ID is linked to a photograph, ten fingerprints and two iris scans of the person involved. There are major research questions related to these cards that computer scientists and others should study.
What are the safeguards necessary for allowing banks, insurance companies, cell phone companies and others to access an individual’s biometrics for identification or other purposes?
I became acutely aware of the risks involved yesterday when a cell phone company tried to persuade my wife to let them access her fingerprint for comparison with the stored fingerprint associated with her Aadhaar number. Visit
“Your fingerprint is not your own! Meaning of privacy in India!"
in the article addressed by the link below. 

Related Publications

Article
Full-text available
Cyber threats are attempts to secure unauthorized access to, change, or delete private information, to demand money from victims, or to disrupt business. Cybercrime includes everything from identity theft, malware threats, email and online fraud, to bank fraud. Businesses and individuals use this method to guard their data centers and other digital...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In the past five years cybercrime has grown to become one of the most significant threats to the safety of the nation and its economy. The government's call to arms has been eagerly accepted by business enterprises and academia. But training cyber security professionals raises a unique set of challenges. Cost, space, time and scalability are among...
Article
Full-text available
It's about cyber security and cyber crime
Got a technical question?
Get high-quality answers from experts.