# Managing Access to Confidential Documents: A Case Study of an Email Security Tool
## 5 Results  
### Opinions about Encrypted Emails  
Before answering our first research question and exploring the security features of end-to-end encrypted email, we wanted first to evaluate our participants' understanding of the encryption concept. We asked the participants several questions, such as (1) rate familiarity with the term \"encryption\" on a scale from 1 to 4 (1 = I have never heard of this, 2 = I have heard of this, but I do not know what it is, 3 = I know what this is, but I do not know how it works, and 4 = I know generally how this works), (2) describe what encryption means, (3) explain whether there is anyone besides the recipient who can read the email content, and (4) explain whether Google gives the government direct access to their email if requested. We found that a majority of the participants (52.6%, N = 10) knew what encryption was, but they did not know how it works, whereas a few participants (N = 3) generally knew how encryption works. However, several participants (26.3%, N = 5) still did not know what encryption was, but they had heard of it. With regard to explaining what encryption means, we found that the most pronounced description was information protection (12/19). For instance, one of the participants (P6) said, _\"I believe encryption is just like protecting your information, so that I'd assume like hackers and other people, and like spam bots can't get access to it beyond that, or like how it actually works and stuff.\"_ The next frequent phrase was scrambling messages (7/19). In the words of P10: _\"Encryption is scrambling, or like scrambling the data in such a way, so that any third party cannot understand what's talking in between the original parties.\"_ Other phrases used by the participants were data encoding and decoding (4/19), data encapsulation (1/19), communication safety (2/19), prevent unauthorized access (2/19), uses codes and keys(5/19), security system (1/19), uses numbers and blockchain (1/19), web security and privacy (1/19), and uses password (1/19). Table 2 summarizes the themes emerging from the participants' responses about what encryption means. Additionally, when asked whether the participants thought there was anyone besides the recipient who could access the content of their email, we found that only two participants did not know if a third party could access and read their emails. Most participants (N = 8, 42.1%) did not think anyone could read and access the content of their emails. For example, there were the following two comments: _\"I don't think anybody reads my email because I think Gmail as an end-to-end encryption model\"_, and _\"because Gmail has protected the email so only the person who I'm sending it to can see it.\"_ The remaining participants (N = 9, 47.4%) believed that there was someone or some third party who could access and read their emails. They stated that hackers (3/19), Gmail or Google employees (6/19), university employees (2/19, with a comment shown below), third parties (2/19), the government (1/19), and police (1/19) could access their emails, aside from the intended recipients. Participant P14 commented, _\"I would say if I'm using something like my school email, they definitely probably can keep tabs on that make sure I'm not doing anything sketchy with my personal email. I don't know of anybody in particular, but I'm sure at some point in time, someone has been able to access my account and read them.\"_  
Table 3 summarizes the themes of the participants' opinions on who could access their emails aside from the intended recipients. Regarding Google giving the government direct access to the participant's emails if requested, we found that the majority of the participants (N = 10, 52.6%) believed that Google gives the government access to their emails when requested, 31.6% of the participants (N = 6) did not think so, and 15.8% did not know whether Google gives the