University of Portsmouth
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
Thanks.
The concept of privacy and security is such a vast and could be applied in several fields.
All Answers (8)
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.
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.
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.
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.
University of Portsmouth
In this case both Privacy and Security are must have in order to mitigate your risks.
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.
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