Google Faces Catch-22 With Deleted Gmails

TechCrunch has details of a developing story involving the Gmail accounts of 60 users who found all emails deleted due to a suspected breach in FireFox.

Now here’s the catch-22 for Google. Supposedly, once an email is deleted in Gmail, it is gone forever. That keeps the privacy conspiracy theorists happy.

If you’re not able to locate a message in your Inbox, Sent Mail, All Mail, or Trash, it’s been permanently removed from your Gmail account. Unfortunately, we’re unable to recover messages or Contact entries that have been deleted from your account.

Now, what if Google is able to restore the deleted emails of the Gmail accounts effected? Wouldn’t that prove that Google keeps a secret backup of all deleted data?

It will be interesting to see how they handle this. On the one hand, restoring the emails would help ease concerns that hackers can’t disrupt Gmail – especially as they push corporate gmail accounts – but, on the other hand it could be a privacy PR nightmare.