[jeswin]

A few decades back, a lot of computer use was emails. And it was stored on someone else's servers - with everyone from server operators along the route, to the government potentially having access to it. Even HTTPS is a relatively recent thing.

I guess what I'm saying is - we've always had this problem.

[kjs3]

As an email admin a few decades back, there's just a tiny bit of difference between "my corp or school has a mail server and holds my email and an admin could look at it" and "Google and a tiny number of other companies hold most everyones email and always looks at it".

[MaxfordAndSons]

Yea there have always been gaps in privacy, but nowadays it's several orders of magnitude easier for corporations to exploit that private data at scale.

[skydhash]

Snail mail is also not secure and can be tampered with. I don’t mind someone hosting my mail. But I do mind Google doing it (based on their behavior).