digitalv - 7:27 pm on Apr 13, 2004 (gmt 0)

Brett,

Isn't that the case with everything though? When you send someone an e-mail, you have no idea who they are going to forward it to or who may be standing over their shoulder looking at it.

If your concern is for the non-Gmail user who doesn't know anything about GMail's privacy and is sending a message to a GMail user, then your concern is misplaced. What a user does with a message after you've sent it to them is beyond your control - whether it's being read by a machine or forwarded by the recipient. Once that message leaves your network, you have no idea who is looking at it anyway.

The GMail user who signed up and read the terms like they're supposed to would know the level of privacy they can expect to receive and they're OK with it. Since they gave you their e-mail address, they're affirming that THEY are OK with Google "reading" whatever you send them.

Besides, I feel that I need to remind people that we're talking about a computer scanning the messages for the sole purpose of content targeting. It's not like it's actually a person there reading your private e-mail and writing down any paswords you receive there.