Last week the Consumer Watchdog turned up some court filings from Google in which, the search giant apparently claimed that users of its Gmail service didn’t have any legitimate right to expect their emails to be private. The apparent ‘admission’ set off alarm bells all over the web, with the Consumer Watchdog recommending that people who care about their email correspondents’ privacy should not use the Internet giant’s services any more.

The admission was alarming for sure, but in reality it was blown all out of proportion by the Consumer Watchdog, which displayed a remarkable lack of understanding about how emails work.

Looking closer at Google’s statement, it becomes apparent that the Consumer Watchdog has in fact misinterpreted what the search giant was saying in its legal mumbo jumbo. What Google actually meant was that emails sent through its Gmail service can never be kept secret, simply because it is responsible for processing and displaying those emails to their recipients. The Consumer Watchdog fails to understand the technological principles behind email – which is that mail servers need to process (and hence, access) people’s emails before they can be displayed in a format that humans can read. By extension, what this means is that if Google can access your mails, then others can read them too.

I’m no Google apologist – in fact I usually jump at any opportunity to attack them – but in this case the Consumer Watchdog has committed a spectacular faux pas by jumping to conclusions, in the process taking attention away from those who’re really responsible for killing off our online privacy – the NSA. More importantly though, the Consumer Watchdog’s ignorance highlights that few of us realize just how inherently insecure all forms of electronic communication are.

Google is quite right when it says people have no reasonable expectations of privacy when using email. There never have been any either – as SiliconANGLE editor Mark Hopkins puts it:

“It’s been that way since the inception of email. All kinds of folks can read your emails. Nosey admins. Busybody companies. Legal teams. Intelligence agencies. Script kiddies with packet sniffers. Literally *everyone* has access to your email..”

It’s not only your emails that are insecure. When you enter your PIN number at an ATM, you’re revealing that PIN code to whoever programmed that ATM machine. Whenever you use a machine or gadget to communicate with someone else, everything you say is processed into computer language by software which in turn, knows how to read that same code, hence it can easily exploited by whoever wrote the software, or anyone else who knows how to read it. Be it Skype chats, WhatsApp, Facebook or regular phone calls, none of these platforms will ever be totally secure.

Few people realize any of this, and that’s sad because it means that most people have no idea how to take steps to protect their communications. Even worse, these same people often have a tendency to laugh at anyone who does know how to protect themselves using strong encryption techniques that even the NSA would have trouble cracking.

It would be nice if we could change this attitude and find a way to encourage more people to begin encrypting their mails. Though many believe that it’s pointless, Google doesn’t actually possess the ability to decrypt messages sent with encryption, and even the NSA has great difficulty in cracking them open. Google isn’t responsible for your privacy – you are, and if last week’s admission has upset you at all, then it’s time for you to start doing something about it.