Google is testing expiring emails in the new Gmail
The really bad-news thing for me here is Google decided it&#x27;s good for business to try DRM for email, doing their best to take away (recipient) user control and talking about it as a feature. (They&#x27;ve _gone along_ with crummy ideas, of course, but _promoting_ DRM for email&#x27;s a whole &#x27;nother thing.)<p>And they do it even though, as you note, there are tons of ways to really do confidentiality much better. The Signal protocol has worked great for chat, to name another example. The problem with that for Google, I guess, is that end-to-end security is more in line with the Apple model of smarts living on the user&#x27;s device, not the Google model that requires the server to read and understand all of every user&#x27;s content. (I say that as someone on Android, Linux, and so on. I&#x27;m not super invested in Apple or their ecosystem.)<p>Also, this idea is salvageable. You could have &quot;request expiration,&quot; etc. and maybe you honor by default but don&#x27;t suggest you enforce it. And managed work environments can try any DRMish stuff they like (though it will still be unreliable!), because the boss is the customer and if they want to make it a pain for the user to do certain things they can. But as it stands now, false sense of security for the average user, and an entirely valid feeling for those parsing the details that companies like Google are more than happy to erode user control.<p>I would love to see this idea ridiculed for how broken it is. Maybe it will even inspire less broken privacy features from competitors.