Gmail discards and the law
Recently I was composing an email in gmail and - like I sometimes do - decided to press the discard button and not send the email. But not before gmail indicated that it had saved my message. After I discarded the email, I checked my "Drafts" to see if it showed up there. No, as I expected. But where do they go? Anywhere? Are they in some kind of Google never-never land? And more important: are they retrievable when someone comes to Google with a court order for someone's emails? Are they stored but Google doesn't release them because technically they are not email? Might they be of value, perhaps revealing information someone had decided was too hot to send in an email? These things are not clear from gmail's Privacy Policy Notice and Google's broader Privacy Policy . And no, I wasn't concerned about any of my own discarded emails. :-)