Random Developments

It looks like some “privacy advocates” are against Google’s GMail service, with a California senator going as far as proposing to outlaw it. Now, I’m very much for privacy, but either I don’t understand what, exactly, this guys are opposed to, or they completely missed the point of the service.

Let’s review it. Google will offer (and is already offering to a select few) 1,000 megabytes of storage space for web-accessible e-mail, for free. In exchange, textual ads may be displayed close to the e-mails, and those ads will be targeted based on words that appear on the messages the user received.

Critics seem to think (or at least are trying to make non-techies think) that someone will actually look at the messages in order to select the ads; a guy I saw today on BBC (didn’t catch his name) was saying that it is completely unacceptable that Google will read private messages. Now, come on. No one will read anyone’s messages! A piece of software will break the message into tokens and will select ads based on those tokens. This is not much different from what several anti-spam solutions do; Bayesian systems, for example, will do exactly the same: scan a message, break it up in tokens, and analyse the tokens to take some action. Is this a privacy issue? I don’t think so.

Going back to GMail, the token-selected ads will be shown to the recipient of the message, who is supposedly well aware of the contents of the message, so that no data is leaking there. Granted, if a user clicks on an ad, presumably the advertiser will know that the hit comes from a GMail ad; if the user then proceeds to buy something (or otherwise identify himself/herself to the advertiser), the advertiser may record the fact that this person receives (or has received, at least once) e-mails with a specific token in them. Then, again, since the user bought something, the advertiser already knows what the user is interested in. It would be a problem if (big hypothetical here) Google were to share with advertisers the information on what users saw which ads; I’m sure advertisers would love that, but I see nothing that indicates that Google would do that (and it would definitely kill their “do no evil” motto).

In any case, in my opinion, it all boils down to: it’s not a compulsory service. No one is being forced to use it. There are plenty of web-based e-mail services, most of them free; if you don’t like GMails privacy policy or ads, go somewhere else. Or pay for a premium service. Me, I would use it, though not as my main mailbox (at least at first); from what I’ve seen in reviews, it looks much better than any other option.