Beware the Gmail Dot Bug

I married my husband thinking my secret dossier on him was substantial enough to be incriminating if the need for leverage arises in the future. After five years, one tends to take some assumptions for granted. Gmail tried to test the strength of this assumption just like how a logical reasoning item on the LSAT (law school admission test) might.

For instance, was I aware that my husband has a bank account in the Cayman Islands? Or that he was recently appointed to a cream position to some company abroad? Or that he was still looking for a wife? (!!!) These are just some of the emails that snuck their way into his inbox courtesy of gmail's dot bug.

If you have a user.name@gmail.com email address, gmail's dot bug explains why you sometimes read emails intended for username@gmail.com. Gmail does not recognize the dot and does not differentiate between user.name and username. Based on the emails that idly wander into another user's inbox, it can be a threat to security and a serious privacy issue-the kind of bug that Nixon would have found especially useful.

For gmail's dot bug has a latent bugging system: one can intrude and "listen" in as it were on the lives of others through emails that were essentially for their eyes only. It's especially interesting for people whose names are quite common. One minute you are an influential president being addressed respectfully with all candor, the next an enterprising investor getting turned down on a loan. Information about namesakes ranging from the mundane to sensitive converge in the inbox of an eponymous email account--with an inconsequential dot that breached all confidentiality and intimacy of a personal account.

What is not clear is whether we are getting copies of emails for the eponymous email account--or the others are. It's hard to tell whether the emails we received that were intended for others were also received by the intended recipient. As a corollary, have been receiving all the emails that were supposed to be ours or have they wandered over to the dotted side?

Voyeurism can definitely go both ways: are we outside looking in or inside looking out?