Advertisment

Does Hotmail infringe on email privacy?

author-image
CIOL Bureau
Updated On
New Update

HYDERABAD: An interview with Ankit Fadia, a software professional and founder of HackingTruths.







What exactly do you mean by saying ‘Hotmail is an open id’, please elaborate?





What this means is that if you have a Hotmail account and if you send an email using your account, then all contents of the email that you send become the propriety property of Hotmail. This is not that much of an issue, because almost all other Email Service Providers also have the same policy. However, what attenuates the problem with Hotmail is the fact that in case of Hotmail, your privacy is completely violated.







Not only does Hotmail add the sender's IP Address to every outgoing email sent from their system, but more shockingly it is believed that Hotmail reads every single email that is received and sent using a Hotmail account. Hence, in other words, Hotmail is keeping an eye on your activities. Almost all other email service providers give away your identity by putting your IP Address to all outgoing emails as well.





You also mentioned that the Email Service Provider is reading every email that we are sending through Hotmail. Exactly how is this possible and is there a remedy to this?







Reading of emails can easily be implemented in two ways: first by employing real people to read through the emails and secondly by using automatic scripts which search all Inboxes and look for certain key words. For example, a typical scanner might look for words like "kill" and "president" in the same email. The only remedy against these privacy violations is to not use email.







With the advent of technology to every corner of the globe and almost to every single office and house, it is impossible to lead a private life these days. However, one should certainly go in for more anonymous and safe email service providers like hushmail.com.






You have selected Hyderabad as the center for your company E2 labs. What exactly would be the area of operations for the company?







I strongly believe that Hyderabad is the most happening place for IT in India after Bangalore. Also, Chandrababu Naidu has taken a lot of initiatives for making Hyderabad a center for a lot of software and IT market activity. The company e2-labs will specialize in security audits of our 'clients' networks.






The company will soon also be entering into the security training market in a very big way. We already have started our operations in Hyderabad with a workforce of around 20-30 software professionals.






What kind of security services are you going to provide for the AP police department over here?






The company is focusing towards five major areas — Public Key infrastructure (PKI), ethical hacking, security assessment & planning, security architecture & design services and training. We are engaged in high-level talks with the police department and things will be finalized soon.



tech-news