[Rastafarian]

"a company that's supposed to be beholden first and foremost to its users" - it's only supposed to if you're stupid enough to believe the PR talk. Generally Microsoft is as trustworthy as Google and any other big corporation (i.e. not much, when it comes to power struggle - which is what privacy is all about).

[mtgx]

I don't think Google is an order of magnitude more trustworthy, but enough to matter - for now. The way Google would be an order of magnitude more trustworthy to me, would be to implement OTR and ZRTP in Google Talk and Hangouts, and to allow private-key encryption for Gmail and Google Drive, done from inside the browser. And of course these options should be right there for you to see when using the service, not buried in deep levels of settings. And they should be on by default, unless there's a technical or UX reason why that's a big negative, like for encrypting e-mails. But for all the other services it should be okay to set encryption on by default.

If you had an option to do so from inside the Gmail client, encryption would become much more mainstream. Techdirt [1] and ArsTechnica [2] had some good articles about it, although I disagree with TechDirt that they should offer "key management" for users. That would defeat the purpose - unless it's guaranteed to only be done by the browser, locally, and they wouldn't have access to that, and it could be easily verified that they're not lying. I think they sort of do this already for the master-password in Chrome.

I don't think these encryption options would hurt their ad-revenue much, and besides - I don't think Google, Microsoft or any other company should scour through my private messages to make their ads more relevant. I don't care how "anonymous" or secure they make it. It's okay if it's public data - but private data? No. Definitely not.

[1] - http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121218/16095921431/why-go...

[2] - http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/12/op-ed-a-plea-to-g...

[Rastafarian]

IMHO they would never do that and you're just being naive ;)

Encryption in the browser would mean no targeted ads, less profit for shareholders, problems with the government.

Again IMHO the reality of today is governments and big business are controlled by a very few people, working against the interests of the masses - i.e. a huge conspiracy.

[dhimes]

I think they should offer this for their paid service and drop the data mining and targeted ads for it- but not offer it for their free service. I should be allowed to pay for true (at least to the limit the government will allow- that's a separate discussion) privacy.

[mseebach]

I agree, this would be pretty good, and I think I'd pay for it. They are in a unique position to build a browser API for dealing with encrypted data.

[muro]

citation needed

edit: Don't they all follow what they say in their TOS? Are the TOS the same? (I don't know, maybe they are)