Email privacy is a myth, regardless of what Google said or didn't say

There’s an old expression in journalism: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”  In other words, take nothing for granted when reporting a story. Apparently those who reported Google’s “shocking admission” about email privacy forgot that little piece of advice. Honestly, besides being a terrible public relations move, it just seemed dang unlikely that Google would come right and out say that Gmail users have no reasonable expectation of privacy. It turns out Google didn’t quite say that, as is pointed out in this week’s lead Searchlight item. But so what if they did? The only shocking thing would be that someone said it out loud. Even encrypted email services have potential vulnerabilities — including, disturbingly, destroying themselves to save customer information from prying eyes. Also in this week’s Searchlight: still more NSA privacy violation revelations, an affirmative use of predictive analytics, the last days of BlackBerry and more.