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Speculating About Gmail
rjelks writes "The Register is running an article about Google's new email service that was mentioned earlier,
here. The story details the new privacy concerns about Gmail's privacy policy and Google's tracking habits. The policy states that Google will not guarantee the deletion of emails that are archived even if you cancel your account. '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.'" Reader cpfeifer writes "Rich Skrenta (founder of ODP, and Topix) speculates in his blog that the real product Google is creating isn't web search or email, but a massively scalable, distributed computing platform. 'It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers.' If he's right, the question isn't what product will Google announce next, but what product will they not be able to announce?"
its a different sort of tool, with the advantager of tracking etc and the disadvantage of not being private. just keep that in mind and there arent many problems. i love the idea, and ill use it if i can. i wont say anything extreme or criminal, and really, it is their property, so they can offer it for my use with whatever terms they like. IP rights and plagarism ideas are rapidly changing in our shrinking world, so keep that in mind
so I think they get the benefit of the doubt until further notice.
Does anybody have anything to the contrary?
I think Gmail is going to be great. It completely blows any other free email service out of the water. So what if privacy is in question? Nobody is forcing anyone to use it. You can use it, enjoy it, and if you really care you can just not send anything you don't want others seeing and use a different address for recieving sensitive emails. Or you can just NOT use it, and go on your way. This isn't a big deal.
Google is just providing a service. Use it if you want, or don't.
I am a filthy pirate.
What amazes me are the services that offer I'm acting as a mini-isp to friends, and with a $50/month dedicated server we're renting, $10/month gets us 10GB of email+web storage.
Hard drive capacity has gone up a lot since the time of HotMail - I'm amazed no free email service started offering reasonable disk space earlier.
I think this is what made it the best april fools joke - the fact that it wasn't.
So all those that came up with all the reasons why it must have been a joke, are the ones that were fooled.
Advanced users are users too!
They're going to have mirrors, snapshots, backups, offsite backups, remote replication... Expecting them to purge your email when you delete your account is crazy.
'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.'
If I can get a free account, myname@google.com, with 1 GB of storage, and with IMAP or POP3, I don't give a damn if they use my mail for marketing research, or if they keep it long after I'm dead. The reason is I don't work for M16, the KGB or the CIA, I only break little laws and I don't dig child porno. So basically who cares if a few of my mails get left on a server somewhere.
Privay is a real concern, but worrying about this is like worrying about the fact that postmen can read your postcard when you send it. The truth is they can, but they don't give a shit.
No-one's going to force you to use the system. If you don't trust it, don't use it.
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
So how soon until someone releases a program to overcome these limitations and do everything automatically?
torrents.google.com ... it doesn't have to be illegal contents.
I wonder if the Gmail service would be available to general public before their IPO? That might increase the value of their stock significantly. Also, once public, they have to answer to investors to maximize the return...and change of management/merger could very well mean significant privacy issues.
If/when Gmail is available, I would use it to store big file attachments (mainly storage) and still use my regular ISP for normal day-to-day communications UNLESS GOOGLE GUARANTEES COMPLETE PRIVACY NOW AND IN FUTURE and no caching of deleted emails and no tracking (seems highly unlikely)...
A distributed system is something truly worthy of the doctorate pedigree of Google's staff. They have an incredible concentration of brain power and I have always found it hard to believe they need all that to add a few more boxes to run a simple page weight algorithm and a web crawler.
Finally, it all makes sense. They're trying to put all (but a few of) the sysadmins out of work! A noble enterprise, indeed. We hate them, they hate themselves.
But seriously, this has been a dream of admins for a long time. 'Bout time somebody sat down and did it. Why can't a single box manage 100,000 others? If one man can do 100 with the right tools he could do them all. The difficulty of transparency is incredible, but even small teams in universities utilizing a few phd's and transient graduate students are making headway in the area. No reason a well funded lab of hundreds of phds working full time can't achieve it.
Wow... I guess the BIG question is what they'll do with it. I mean... are they just doing it for their existing products? Are they going to license it out for astronomical sums to places like Lockheed and Sandia? Will they (gasp) open source it? Or, most frightening, they will run the world's largest, most efficient super computer and charge pennies for utility based computing and put Sun and IBM out of business in the process of creating a mainframe monopoly out of whiteboxes. Heck... they could probably buy out Sun to get that sweet Solaris technology for themselves. IBM has all kinds of retarded patents for toilet seats and ways to dance on an office chair. I guess they're worth getting for a laugh.
Here's my question: how are they going to make sure people only have one account each? What's to prevent people from getting dosens and backing up their harddrive?
They don't limit the number of accounts, they just limit attatchment size and keep an eye out for abuses, like hundreds of downloads of from 1 account, or a scripted mailing of hundreds of 10 meg attatchments to any one account.
How many people are seriously going to back up their hard drives in 10MB chunks?
The whole HDD? Probably not many (although I suppose you could zip it and span into floppy-sized chunks... <shudder> I remember doing that back in the days of mere 40MB HDDs, and it sucked. Don't even want to imagine it now).
But, imagine this - Upload your entire Ogg/MP3 collection, as a set of email attachments. Poof, instant access to your entire music library from anywhere on the planet. Not exactly "instant" access, but good enough over broadband to stream in realtime.
Which leads to another point - Will Google bother making it difficult to get files into and out of your storage, or just let us basically abuse it however we want?
There are technical solutions like PGP for those who are concerned about their emails being read.
For those people who are concerned about google monitoring thier searching habits, why not use a proxy server?
For those people concerned about privacy issues: If you don't understand the medium enough to protect yourself, don't trust it. The best solution for protecting yourself online is understanding the battlefield. Knowledge is power, therefore you should arm yourself. It is as simple as that.
This is the Internet. You can say "fuck" here. - AC
I don't see why the privacy zealots are all up in arms about this. Don't they have something better to do like bitch about the Patriot Act? Seriously!
Google has been very up-front about what they will or will not be willing to do with the cookie "trifecta" (Google-Orkut-Gmail, as mentioned in the Register article) that they are gunning for. Not only is it spelled out quite clearly in the Gmail Privacy Statment, the co-founder is going on recrod saying "Hey, that's not such a bad idea."
What's my point? If you're neurotic about your privacy and you're apprehensive about giving someone the ability to cross-reference your search info with your personal info and your mail info, turn off cookies and don't use Gmail.
Let's all repeat this slowly, just to let it sink in: If you don't want to use Gmail, you don't have to use Gmail.
If Google goes ahead with Gmail and includes 1E9 bytes of storage per user account, as it plans to, there's obviously going to have to be some sort of cost involved to offset their decision to provide an extremely valuable service. Much like Hotmails users are required to pawn their eternal soul to the Prince of Darkness, Gmail users are going to have to bite the bullet and accept that their privacy may not be so private anymore. Why is this such a big problem?
[END rant]
--
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
Does anyone see the potential for Gmail to be used as a huge shared spam database. Include a simple "classify email as spam" on the webmail interface, add the spam to a shared Bayesian filter dictionary. Allow mail clients to compare incoming mail with Gmail's database. At the least, this could eliminate the need for new mail users to having to train their filters for a couple of weeks before it starts becoming effective.
If gmail wants to store a bunch of my obsolete PGP'd mails please let them do so. Email's never been really private. If you really care about email privacy you should encrypt your mail. And you can still do that using gmail, I suppose?
A project like this would take garbage and sift through it to find, make, stamp and press gold.
The skynet jokes while funny, don't do anything to curtain the tin foil wonderment at possibly the greatest data mining/data tool created to date.
This story is bigger than it appears. ((um...and greetings to the new data overlords :P)))
Let's keep in mind that patents are in place to keep lawyers employed and keep them litigating. -CatGrep
Wow! Google always get a free pass on Slashdot, it seems.
"Privacy isn't a concern because, after all, *you* choose to give it up by using the service"? I think it's wrong. I think the facts that Gmail reads your incoming mail to choose which text ads it will show you is a very bad precedent. Isn't it the first time someone offers a communication service and they tell you that they will know the content of every message you get?
The fascination with the power of technology blinds the Google team it seems (like it blinds people on Slashdot), I wonder what Norvig thinks of this issue...
Is the system to instantly correlate the billion biometric files that might be created if everyone falls for biometric passports.
If every European, Japanese, American, basically everyone with a passport is made to deliver up their fingerprints, photographs and maybe iris scans, there will need to be a system to cross check all of this "At the speed of Google", every time a passport holder crosses a border anywhere in the world. Google will provide this service to governments, over an SSL secured web interface.
Google has the experience, they have the hardware in place, and they are going to make a fortune out of this. If they do it, it will be the greatest switch from good to pure evil in the history of software.
I use the word "might" above because this Biometric Net may not be created if everyone simply refuses to be fingerprinted and photographed. Of all the countries in line for this, the Americans will probably shout the loudest. Fingerprinting is for criminals; to be forced to get fingerprinted and biometrically photographed to get a passport, the data of which will be stored by other governments and anyone with an RFID reader is simply too much to swallow for any freedom loving person.
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
email compresses, really, really well
I suspect they will have at least 5:1 compression ratio, and they aren't going to allocate one gigabyte per person the moment the person signs up. So the storage requirements aren't as daunting as one might initially imagine?
Also, their spam detection will probably be superb with as many people as you might expect to sign up and the quality of their search/compare algorithims.
Anything confirming that it's not an April Fools' joke which was published after the 1st of April?
Email is one of the few applications that bring people back for many pageviews. Note how Google state on the GMail page that you'll only see 'relevant ads'?
;)
I've been seeing Adsense popping up on all sorts of new sites recently. Having ads delivered based on the content of your email is pretty clever. I wonder what adverts it will show when the spam comes rolling in?
Gmail was a fantastic April Fools Day joke. They convinced a lot of people that it wasn't for real by making the press release on April 1st, but then it turned out to be true. Genius. This was the only good April Fool I saw this year.
Why is anything anything?
TRUST.
i personally don't think the question here is the what-ifs and whos and whats that Gmail might mean. i think the core issue here is whether we are willing to entrust Google with that information.
Hotmail, Netscape Mail, @ddress, et. al., all provide a service similar to Gmail. the only real difference i can see (looking specifically at the privacy policies) is that Gmail is more open about their policies and is more willing to state openly that there is redundancy in their storage system. i'm sure Hotmail, et. al., have redundant storage for their email services, and that there are concerns similar to if not identical to the concerns addressed by the Gmail privacy policy.
i commend Google for being open about this, and because they specifically address it, i'm fully willing to open a Gmail account and use it for my personal email. hell, i'd use it for business email without a single worry.
why? i trust Google. they are opening up and telling me what they do with my emails and what happens to them. that's important to me. that's why i'm willing to trust them.
i, for one, welcome our new email overlords.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
Americans already give their fingerprints out for ATM and debit/credit cards today. The vast majority of Americans have no qualms about recording their fingerprints if they believe it will add to their own security.
Another thing freedome advocates like you miss is that most people dont care if their information gets out, because, they have nothing to hide and they have nothing to lose.
Storing and processing the email of millions of users could be a good way to make PageRank more effective. What's a more valuable indicator of a page's importance than for its URL to be sent in an email ("hey! check this out" )?
Of course, their spam control would need to be stellar...
Even if they are tracking you for targetted advertising... then so what? I am sure the information comes in handy- IE when my mom types in the keyword "apples" into google that she probably wants some candles or a painting or some massive doily to sheath our house in or whatever, but when I type it in I want to see some G5's or ipods. I am sure there are other uses than just clarifying ambiguous search terms. Amazon uses similar techniques, and their recommendations when I log in are usually pretty on the spot- IE stuff that if given unlimited time and money, I would buy.
Unless they start sending me unsolicited spam, either via email or to my house, I have no problem with this. I often appreciate the targeted ads on google. Especially since the spammers started creeping in, sometimes the ads are more what im looking for than the actual results. Anything not personally identifying is A-ok with me.
Google has been pretty legit so far, and has gone well out of its way to keep its users happy, so nailing them to the cross over something that might happen seems premature.
Imagine your mother is opening a day care center, is anyone going to start screaming in horror, picketing, filing lawsuits? Probably not.
Now imagine that your mother has been convicted of making and selling kiddie porn.
Whoops! Maybe reputation makes a difference.
Infuriate left and right
Has it occured to anyone that keeping residual copies of e-mails, possibly even for a time after the account is deleted, is necessary, even required, to back up the data? Google's privacy policy is unique in that it tells you what they do with your information, rather than (only) what they'll let other people do with your information.
The other large privacy concern here, that of ad-delivery, requires Google to scan e-mails for keywords. Yep. Big woop. They do that every time you search, you know -- and in the e-mails, their privacy policy specifically says that no humans will read it without specific permission to solve e.g. technical problems.
Tin foil hats can go back in the closet, boys.
"Evil company X is threatening to restrict our rights! Let's all get together to stop--OOOH! SHINEY!!!" -- AC
massively scalable, distributed computing platform
Rather, how about
which makes the most sense to me.Google already has a special advantage in knowing what kinds of search terms consumers are throwing at them, as well as which of the presented links are being clicked from which IP addresses. That kind of knowledge could actually help them to maintain their grip on the search market compared to newcomers.
By offering an email service where they can comb through the email archive using search technologies, they can determine, for example, whether ad-sponsored emails work, what makes them work better, etc.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I'm signing up for this as soon as I can - not because I want it or need it at the moment, but because if I'm going to use it at some point in the future, I'd rather be myname@gmail.com rather than myname3478998634@gmail.com
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I would expect someone would include Asimov's three laws of robotics, IF AND ONLY IF they expected their creation go gain sentience. The creators of Skynet did not, and therefore wouldn't have included the three laws.
To guard yourself, you'd have to add a layer to all of your code to check wether an action would break any of the three laws. You'd have to add this layer to everthing from your basic toaster on up. The layer would have to be on the verge on sentience itself. A simple layer could deduce that the machine was going to fire a lazer cannon at a person, but to catch subtler attacks would be far more difficult.
I think what I'm trying to say is that having a sense of ethics requires sentience.
Great, let's open up multiple accounts, post the passwords/usernames for the world at large to see, and mail those accounts mp3's until they're full. New way to share gig's upon gig's of mp3's?
If I were Google, I would implement some form of bandwidth throttle, with a sliding time window per account and per connection. That way it could not be seriously abused.
Otherwise I would see this as a near perfect vehicle for warez/mp3/etc... I huge distributed file system in the sky, it could easily be wrapped accessing it like usenet with no "falling off" the server. You would have a number of "key" accounts that index the data accounts, which distribute the data across any number of accounts and messages in those accounts - all with googles bandwidth.
Home Automation & Linux -- now I know I'm a geek
Google is the internet!
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Google has some swing in the tech industry...
I believe Intel's decisin to base their future processors off the Pentium M core are a result of Google's insistence that better power consumption was more important than raw performance per chip.
Google killed Itanium. Long live Pentium M.
http://news.com.com/2100-1006-5181256.html