"End-to-end" implies that Gmail won't be able to read your emails. That means that this software and Gmail, one of Google's largest products, are going to be competing. One of them needs to adapt or die: if this software isn't backdoored or vulnerable right now, it will either be shuttered, backdoored or made vulnerable in the future. (Certainly Gmail is of tangible, financial good to them: it's more likely for them to favor it over End-to-End, which is a non-profit and humanitarian effort.)
Heh, that's actually a neat idea. The profile of people which regularly send/receive encrypted email is basically geeks right now. Key off of the "-----BEGIN PGP ENCRYPTED MESSAGE-----" bit.
Yeah. Honestly, I think that if you know that someone encrypts their messages, you probably know a lot more about them then most other data points reveal.
It would also get Google a lot of street cred for being a privacy centric business.
My only problem is, I just don't see how you can scale the Chromebook software stack to a privacy centric business. I can't imagine trying to secure PGP keys on a Chromebook. But I haven't used one since the early beta models, so others may have more informed opinions,.
Sure using this will just send a bunch of gibberish to Gmail in the body such that Gmail won't be able to auto-scan for ad keywords to send to you. But this probably will be used by .000001% of Gmail users, so I doubt they are worried about this affecting their business in any meaningful way.
And, even among those people who do use it, a big percentage of their email will remain unencrypted. Transactional email like flight or hotel booking confirmations sent from the airline or hotel. I have to think that's the valuable stuff to Google in terms of selling ads, not the topics you would choose to encrypt.
So the downside to them is not that big. And it's offset by the upside of user trust and confidence being maintained, or at least eroding less.
