[WalterBright]

Do you believe that if the government provided email, that the government wouldn't keep track of everything you did on it?

[idle_zealot]

Depends on the health of our institutions. In the US at least they're legally obligated not to by the highest law in the land. It gets ignored now, but it's a more promising path to privacy-preserving digital infrastructure than letting the private market handle it.

[WalterBright]

Oh, I think it's been ignored for a long time. Remember Snowden?

> but it's a more promising path to privacy-preserving digital infrastructure than letting the private market handle it.

The history of governments suggests otherwise.

[bigstrat2003]

Unfortunately, the Constitution has been flagrantly ignored by the federal government for close to 100 years now, if not longer. Everything that FDR did was blatantly unconstitutional, but nobody stopped him, nor did they roll it back when he was gone. The Constitution has no real practical power to restrain the government if the people don't exercise their rights as voters to hold it accountable, and it is abundantly clear that the unconstitutional stuff the government gets up to is (largely) actually pretty popular.

[s1mplicissimus]

Do you believe the government doesn't keep track of your email, just because it's hosted on googles servers?

[WalterBright]

I used a private mail server for years, and the government didn't keep track of it. Of course, what happened at the email's destination, who knows?