Michel Jullian wrote: > The same goes for most programs these days. They communicate with the > > Mothership, downloading updates and uploading trouble reports. They could > be > > scouring your disk for credit card numbers . . . >
> True, but email is particularly vulnerable, since it is _meant_ to > leave your machine at one time or other. Good point. Not only that, but it stays on the Google servers. It would be a trivial matter for someone inside Google to write a program that looks for plaintext credit card numbers in e-mail. > It would have to be > encrypted, I guess that would work, nothing prevents one to send > encrypted emails via gmail or any email provider technically I don't > think. I read that free, public-key encryption programs are available and highly effective. I have never tried one. I am sure you can send encrypted files with gmail or any other e-mail system. You could just make the encrypted document an attachment if other methods fail. It may be that the NSA or Google can crack these encrypted messages, but as far as anyone knows, all methods of doing this take a lot of computer power, so it would be expensive for them, and not worth the trouble unless they already have a reason to target you. Anyway, it hides the data from a simple search. If you are sending people lists of credit card numbers, you should encrypt them. All actual credit card transactions on the Internet are encrypted. - Jed
