p2pnet - rss feed: Google-Mail privacy concerns
p2pnet.net News:- When on April 1 Google announced it was going to offer an email service with 1 gig (1,000 mb) of storage, a lot (most?) people thought it was a joke, especially considering the guys at Google do like a laugh, to wit their infamous Pigeon system.
The idea was users would get this great email service and they’d never have to delete anything because all their incoming would be archived and, thus, would be easily and readily retrievable in the future.
The catch was: adverts would be involved and they’d be a little like those you see on a lot of sites (including ours). That’s to say they’d be keyed to a particular interest.
The Statesman explains it here like this: “[…] if you frequently use the word ’soccer’ in e-mail exchanges, you can expect some sort of advertisement for soccer-related gear in the future”.
The mainstream media response went something like this:
- 1gig per user? Must be a joke !
- It’s not a joke? Wow! Where can we get one?
- There’s advertising involved, and some kind of software reads your email? Whoa!!! PRIVACY INVASION!!! PRIVACY INVASION !!!
But, the author of The Statesman piece continues, “it doesn’t bother me that Google is planning to spy on my e-mail if I choose to sign up for Gmail.
“What bothers me is the so-called ‘targeted advertising’ the service promises to provide.
“To address some privacy concerns, Google says mail will be scanned by only computers, not humans. These computers will have the task of looking for keywords to match them with advertisements.”
The writer makes the point that “Google has been rather tasteful about its advertising partners” and “places its advertisements off to the side of the screen and eschews banners, pop-ups and the like”.
BUT - there’s a but.
“It’s just that Internet advertising scares me because the stuff many companies sell on the Web is not something I’d be remotely interested in,” the author says, concluding:
“Add that to computers picking keywords and it becomes really threatening.
“I mean, what if the machine picks ‘ball’ instead of ’soccer’ as a keyword?”
What indeed …
April 25th, 2004 at 3:14 am
Well then, p2pnet, you’d get ads for the Ball Corporation (No. 2 on the Google search),
I personally have no qualms about G-mail and its rather infamous e-mail ad service. If it is done by machine, then that is enough to prove to me that no human will read my messages.
I think that us, our society, as a whole, has been exposed to too much paranoia and movies like the Matrix. The first one was enough to get people to go crazy over finding “the real world”, add two more sequels, and I wouldn’t be suprised to find people hiding in basements preparing for war with the next generation’s computers.
Think about it, people! Our computers are mindless, dumb machines. They are a hunk of very complicated metal, and a bit of software that makes everything work. There is virtually no chance that a supercomputing AI is going to rise out of this and take over the world. We have about 50 years of computing history to prove this… (I say ‘virtually’ because I don’t know for sure.)
So if google’s search bot wants to read my e-mail and show me ads, then that’s okay! They’re small, and non-intrusive. Compare this with Yahoo’s advertisements, they cover a full quarter of my monitor, yet I don’t even pass a glance in that direction anymore. (Also because their ads are so stale that you can memorize the information off of them after 5 minutes - Yahoo Personals, anyone? “This Winter, generate your own heat”… etc etc). Most of all, google’s ads are text-only. So that takes up very little webpage real-estate.
Our society needs to lighten up. Save your worrying for the war going on in the real world, computers aren’t going to take us over yet. Not for a long while, anyway.
April 25th, 2004 at 11:35 am
they may only be machines but a human made the machine and what if the software used to scan the messages for find key words to use for you targeted spam? Is there other software that compiles what keywords you used and does a human read those results?
In all honesty I don’t think it’ll be any different than their search engine… plug in a word you get ads generated geared towards the keywords you used…They know what IP you have, what browser you used, what OS you have, might even have your full name if you used it for your admin account in the OS, what screen resolution etc … any website that has a tracker gets this information. Is THAT an invasion of privacy?
frankly i’ll get an account but it wont be for really personal information - more than likely it’ll be a holding space for forum registrations and other places where I cant get around the required email address. when I first heard of this I thought, “cool now i wont have to check my yahoo account and delete all the spam I get as often.”
this is the price of free folks … spam and more spam. You have a choice… DON’T get an account or DO. It’s all up to you
April 26th, 2004 at 6:35 am
Keywords that generate adverts are fine, but take it another step. Right now there’s all that terrorist crap happening. What if the FBI demanded Google to submit all e-mails that used the word ‘bomb’, for instance? What if Kazaa demanded all e-mails with a rival link? What if the RIAA demanded all instances of songs disclosed? Since the e-mail lives ‘forever’, it’s not like one can simply delete it. If you use the word ‘dope’, can the police keep tabs on you?
I know that all of what I said isn’t gonna happen soon, but it could definately happen.
All it takes is the record industry saying….’Hey! People are stealing our product on Gmail!’
Google might promise that no ‘human’ will read the mail, but, in the future, I bet the courts will make them break that promise.