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The Internet search firm insists that it needs to know what's in the e-mails that pass through its system -- so that they can be sprinkled with advertisements Google thinks are relevant.
Mod Note:
Several privacy related stories can be found here [news.google.com].
[edited by: WebGuerrilla at 8:37 pm (utc) on April 2, 2004]
what you do on the net (if you surf with the toolbar on, which I personally never think to turn it off),
and soon your boring life goings on as well.
(if you use Gmail).
That sure as heck better be hack proof with respect to their employees and everyone else. Personally, I think it's way too much information to have stored anywhere.
p.s. If someone already covered this, please forgive me.
<added>Forgot credit card info if you shop their store (does anyone?:)
JPell
[edited by: jpell at 9:41 pm (utc) on April 3, 2004]
Wonder if Paul was the one who wrote gmail? or maybe it was April.
What if Gmail determines that someone is involved in criminal activity?
Drum roll ...
ΚΚΚΚΚΚΚThey will send Gmen after you.
{smile}
MV
I asked this earlier but no one responded. What if Gmail determines that someone is involved in criminal activity? Will they report it?
If the "rogue" pharmacy is outside the US, if a customer outside the US orders from for delivery outside the US then this is beyond DEA jurisdiction. The Internet is international. Drug laws in other parts of the world are often much different than in the US. Heck, peyote is a Schedule I narcotic in the US along with heroin, yet is totally legal next door in Canada.
Google is probably serving these ads from inside the U.S. Even if they serve the ads from outside the U.S., Google's status as a corporate entity is based in the U.S., and the control over this service emanates from persons who reside in the U.S.
I think google should know everything about me, they have a cute logo and we know that they "don't do evil", thats good enough for me! I trust them completely and quite frankly they are such a swell bunch of people that I would trust them implicitly with all my personal info, c'mon guys they call themselves googlers, that is so cute I can't imagine them being nefarious about anything!
I would like for them to read all emails so that maybe they can do something about all the evil people out there, that would be soooooo cool!
Google rocks!
Only if you want to send mail to a Ghead.
Which brings up another twist; doesn't the sender have an expectation of privacy? They are listening in on both ends and I don't think the TOS could be read and understood by everyone.
A joke on the world. I think you will see many policies in place from anyone dealing with sensitive personal info:
We do not deliver to gmail accounts, if you wish to correspond use a different account.
If you knowingly sent confidential info to a Gmail account I'm pretty sure you could be held liable for something.
Dear Ghead@gmail.com:
Your AIDs test was positive
Your taxes are late
Your children are booked on flight number ###
uh huh..I smell trouble.
It's so cute!
How about Go Ogle Mail?
Oh goodie! Another cool feature! I certainly don't want records of my correspondence to disappear in this lifetime, I love how this will "keep the memories alive" even if I try to delete them.
go google!
"The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the service. Indeed, residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account."
I'm not one to be overly trusting of corporations (or governments!), but some of the things people are saying here seem to require a large degree of inside information; without more information, some of the things getting said here don't seem demonstrable. Anyone have any thoughts about these questions?
Finally, a comment to the people with the insane idea that 'there's no risk to privacy because Google employees couldn't read all that mail' (and variations) -
In case those of you who are saying this haven't noticed, Google is very good at information search and retrieval; there wouldn't need to be any human intervention with individual emails, only with the selection of what to search for and what to do with the results.
Put on your tin-foil hats folks! Yesterday I had to block googlebot from crawling my brains! ;-)
-B
[edited by: bedlam at 8:21 pm (utc) on April 4, 2004]
Which brings up another twist; doesn't the sender have an expectation of privacy?
I know when I send email that just about every ISP with any clue about today's Internet is going to have a spamfilter and/or virus filter that read my email before it gets passed through to the person I'm trying to contact. Those spamfilters are going to read the WORDS inside my email, looking for signature signs of spam, such as:
Judging from the number of times people ask me, "Did my email make it through to you?", I have to assume that more and more people realize their emails are being pre-screened before I see them.
And what these spamfilters do is exactly what Gmail will be doing to determine what ads to serve -- reading the words. This aspect of Gmail is no different at all from what most ISPs offer with their spamfilter.
what if someone sends me a mail from Gmail. Will I see the targetted ads
No. There are no ads inside the actual emails. The ads appear on the web interface that the Gmail user sees when s/he logs in to use Gmail. Please look at the various screenshots that are floating around.
and conversely if I send anotherMail to this person, will the content of my mail be mined for targetted advertising.
Yes. That's how it works.
if I say that I had attended the funeral of somebody who had died of food poisoning
Google says that ads will not be shown when the email content is deemed to be "sensitive". To my knowledge, we've yet to discuss that part of the Gmail system in detail here on WebmasterWorld. I'm looking forward to the stories of what is and isn't deemed sensitive...... :)
Anyway, I posted a bit about Gmail in message #204 of this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]
In case those of you who are saying this haven't noticed, Google is very good at information search and retrieval; there wouldn't need to be any human intervention with individual emails, only with the selection of what to search for and what to do with the results.
There can be no doubt that Google is very good at information search and retrieval. However they do get things wrong on occasion and the very fact that there is no human intervention is the main reason for this.
I think the consequences of getting it wrong with email could be more serious but only time will tell.
If you are concerned with a computer algorithm 'reading' your e-mails, you are probably a little paranoid. If you are concerned with Google harvesting your information and habits, keep in mind that they would probably do it to make the service better, and besides, if you own a credit card and have ever purchased anything online, there are services that allow people to purchase your information for circa. $20
If you are an honest advocate of privacy and feel a genuine fear, lobby your congressman to get the laws changed. Regardless, Google is the least of your privacy and identity theft concerns.
Go on, take the e-mail and run
In case those of you who are saying this haven't noticed, Google is very good at information search and retrieval; there wouldn't need to be any human intervention with individual emails, only with the selection of what to search for and what to do with the results.There can be no doubt that Google is very good at information search and retrieval. However they do get things wrong on occasion and the very fact that there is no human intervention is the main reason for this.
I think the consequences of getting it wrong with email could be more serious but only time will tell.
I think you read my post too quickly. I said that it's crazy to assume (as some posts in this thread have) that privacy abuses are impossible simply because of the volume of mail.
If Google were to decide to mine their users' emails for data, I would be very worried because I know that they could do a very good job of it.
-B
"Consumers should be aware that there's a vast violation of European law occurring here...."
"If a person deletes an email, he should be confident that email is actually deleted...."
Story here [reuters.com]
1) I've read all sorts of horror stories of people trying to get personal information like address and phone number removed from search.
2) orkut is crazy scary on the privacy front.
3) Ever try to get a usenet article removed from google groups that was originally posted from an email address you nolonger have? I have tried to get articals removed that I wrote not just prior to the existense of Google but of the WWW. I certainly had the expectation at the time that my musings where ephemeral - not archived forever in an easily searchable format.
Then you merely had totally unrealistic expectations. If you are not aware of how Google got all those Usenet posts even prior to the existence of Dejanews, they acquired them from Usenet folks who had been archiving large portions of Usenet for many years before Google even came into being. Usenet posts can be trivially archived by anyone.
[winternet.com...]
BTW, don't be led into a false sense of security by the X-No-Archive header. Someone else tomorrow may put up a Usenet archive including all the X-No-Archive posts. ;)
The only truly troubling aspect of this IMO is the permanent storage of email. If that turns out to be true, it would be the one thing that stops me from trying Gmail.
time to create a canned response for received
gmail.
this account does not accept correspondence
from gmail accounts, if you have a legitimate
reason to contact this account, please use
another account
don't forget, a reply to a gmail account will
more than likely also be subject to analysis
and archiving, whether the originating account
is a gmail account or not.
scope creep of a tos.
maybe this is not such a good idea.
version 2 of the tos might add:
you further consent to receive additional emails
from us and to have emails sent under your
account name that contain other material from our
content partners which has become available
since the archiving of an email that was
previously transmitted by or tranferred
through any of our and our partners servers.
these will be considered to be addenda to the
original messages and hence, the sending of
email to your correspondents has been
preauthorised by the original instruction
to send the email.
Reuters reports that a UK citizens group has lodged a formal complaint against Google re: Gmail.
"Consumers should be aware that there's a vast violation of European law occurring here...."
"If a person deletes an email, he should be confident that email is actually deleted...."
Ahh..., the voice of sanity.
Further from the same story:
Yahoo explicitly says it will delete any emails or other information after an account is closed.
But they didn't predate the time that people could make Usenet archives. You just didn't consider that some might do so, and years later they'd become easy to find by anyone on the Internet. Personally, I am glad that Google is preserving such an important part of Internet history. (I say that as I am a serious Usenet rat.)
