Harassment from a Gmail user

Previously I suggested not letting children receive email from Gmail because they hide the source IP address making it easier for bad guys to hide. In contrast, the free webmail services from Yahoo and Hotmail do not hide the source IP address.

In response, Google pointed me to an item at the Gmail help center called Harassment from a Gmail user. Below is what Google has to say regarding harassing emails from a Gmail user.

"... if you feel that you are in danger, we suggest contacting your local authorities.

Because message headers and senders can be spoofed using a variety of means, we're unable to take action on any user without further verification. In accordance with state and federal law, it is Google's policy only to provide information about a specific Gmail user pursuant to a valid third party subpoena or other appropriate legal process.

We apologize for any inconvenience, and we're sorry that you're receiving such messages."

Google won't take complaints directly from harassment victims and they omit contact information for law enforcement agencies. Not particularly comforting.

Judge for yourself, but I think this validates my prior suggestion not to let children receive email from Gmail users. The source IP address can not directly identify someone, (for more about this see What does your IP address say about you?) but victims of harassment are far better off with it than without it.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

[Michichael]

Pointless blog is pointless?

Duh. How often do people get "harassed" anyway via e-mail and not use the handy "ignore" command. And if a person creates multiple accounts to e-mail, just shoot an e-mail over to [e-mail] about them spamming.

[pjk0]

Actually this has been one of key problems I've had with Gmail since the beginning. But people have been so ga-ga eyed about Gmail that they rarely listen to this sort of thing.

There are other privacy issues with Google products (cookie retention and internal database retention for search, as well as email data retention for Gmail) and as a result of global concern on this front they have twice reduced the timespan that they hold personally-identifiable information on users. It is not anyone's imagination.

[blsith]

Wait, you want them to keep track of who you should call for law enforcement? Call you local police's cyber crimes unit, give them the evidence and they will issue a subpoena to Google if necessary. If you got the IP address, what would you do with it? You'd go to the ISP that owns it and ask "who was this", and they'd give you ... amazingly... THE EXACT SAME RESPONSE. That data is part of customer records, and any decent ISP will require a legal document requesting the specific information in order to release who the person is. If your ISP does not follow that policy, I'd get a new ISP.