You knew, and technologists knew. I'm not sure how many "ordinary" people knew how email worked.
The closest analogy in the physical world is a letter. We have an expectation that won't be opened. Unless educated otherwise, a lot of people transfer that expectation directly.
Cf. mark zuckerberg's early amazement that people would enter all kinds of information into facebook
A better comparison would be a postcard. And in fact, many years ago I was advised just that: treat email as being as private as a postcard. Most likely, nobody besides the intended recipient will bother to read it, but a number of people could read it.
For as much as folks half my age are purported to understand technology, I think we may have received better general instruction in using the internet in years gone by... or maybe we were just more wary of it, knowing that we didn't understand all of the implications.
> The closest analogy in the physical world is a letter. We have an expectation that won't be opened. Unless educated otherwise, a lot of people transfer that expectation directly.
The closest analogy is a postcard, and that's the analogy that is often used.
> We have an expectation that won't be opened.
But you don't send cash through the mail, because you know that even though there are strict laws in place people do steal cash from mail. We expect that valuable stuff is vulnerable. We send it by courier, with insurance, with tamper-evident seals. Or we put it in a locked case and give it to an employee to take. Or we put it in a diplomatic bag.
People just don't think their letter to Auntie Flo is as valuable as a $10 bill. It's a shame they need to start protecting all their information, but they can't really say they weren't warned.
> "The closest analogy is a postcard, and that's the analogy that is often used."
Yes, the closest analogy is a post card. No, I do not believe it was the one used most often. Perhaps now it is, but not in the early days. Sending letters is the most common analogy I've come across and every icon, graphic, etc related to email has reinforced that view (it's even called mail). It's reasonable to assume that non-tech people using email today have based their assumption on a false analogy.
> "People just don't think their letter to Auntie Flo is as valuable as a $10 bill."
Following on from my point above, people have a reasonable expectation that their mail isn't being opened and scanned by default. That's why it's ok to send letter to Auntie Flo complaining about your boss etc. No-one is making value judgements the way you describe every time they hit 'send'.
"Whoever takes any letter, postal card, or package out of any post office or any authorized depository for mail matter, or from any letter or mail carrier, or which has been in any post office or authorized depository, or in the custody of any letter or mail carrier, before it has been delivered to the person to whom it was directed, with design to obstruct the correspondence, or to pry into the business or secrets of another, or opens, secretes, embezzles, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both." [1]
> "... but they can't really say they weren't warned."
When were they warned and how? By all those people from the past? Weren't those folks lumped in the same category as alien abductees and conspiracy theorists?
The closest analogy in the physical world is a letter. We have an expectation that won't be opened. Unless educated otherwise, a lot of people transfer that expectation directly.
Cf. mark zuckerberg's early amazement that people would enter all kinds of information into facebook