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?"

Comments

It just isnt private email

[Moonpie Madness]

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

Re:It just isnt private email

[MoonBuggy]

While I wouldn't want anything that's really private on this account, I wouldn't want it on hotmail either. I'd either use encryption over existing free services (less tracability) or just use my own mailserver.

Things like credit card numbers, bank data, passwords etc. will be perfectly safe, even if the data is scanned. Google are smart enough not to have the publicity problems they would get if they revealed any private info, and it's not really as if anyone cares what my email says. They are scanned for advertising purposes, they are not proof read to see if anything interesting is happening in my life. I feel safe because I know Google won't do anything with my financail details because they have PR people who know that would cripple their service uptake and I know they couldn't care less about my personal life.

Having said that, for me and I'm sure plenty of other slashdotters it's a moot point - I have my own mailserver which I can check on my home machine via thunderbird, my phone via the built in GPRS mail client and from anywhere else with a browser via squirrelmail. 10GB storage, no attachment limits and unlimited addresses I can check from anywhere - it's easily worth what I pay for it.

Google has AFAIK a wonderful track record

[bersl2]

so I think they get the benefit of the doubt until further notice.

Does anybody have anything to the contrary?

Re:Google has AFAIK a wonderful track record

[Prune]

Well, Google has pretty much become the de facto portal to most people's information. The potential to filter that information and influence public opinion is scary. Of course, they wouldn't try anything until they've completely spread their roots into everything, but they are already on the way of getting there. What monopoly could be more dangerous than information monopoly?

Re:Google has AFAIK a wonderful track record

[AlecC]

But they haven't shown any sign of trying to exploit it dangerously yet. And they haven't shown any signs of anti-competitive behaviour. The only lock-in method they use is the honourable one of providing a better service.

Google rose fast. If it misbehaved, it could fall fast. There are plenty of competitors waiting in the wings, some with plenty of budget (M$, Yahoo).

I think that we should give Google the benefit of the doubt - while keeping eyes wide open. Abuse of power occurs when people think they can get away with it, either because no-one is looking or because they cannot do anything about it if they are. The second case doesn't apply - we can all switch search engines, email hosts ets easily. We must avoid the first: keep an eagle eye on Google, but make it a friendly one.

It's great

[blitzoid]

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.

disk space is cheap.

[ron_ivi]

I've seen Fry's have 200GB drives on sale for $79 before; and I'm sure if you're buying them in units of 10,000 they're even cheaper than that.

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.

Re:disk space is cheap.

[ron_ivi]

Darn < sign made that second paragraph uninteligible. Should have read

What amazes me are the services that offer <100MB storage. 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.

Re:disk space is cheap.

[pla]

I've seen Fry's have 200GB drives on sale for $79 before; and I'm sure if you're buying them in units of 10,000 they're even cheaper than that.

True. However, 1PB would require over 5200 of them. Which would in turn require over 650 machines to stick them in (at 8 drives per node, itself probably a tad high since the bus would grind to a crawl in such a machine). All that adds up to at least half of a million dollars.

And for what - Something that amounts to a community service project? Hey, I'll give Google full credit for their current image in the geek community, but this seems a tad ridiculous.

So, I'd say they must have some sort of ulterior motive behind this. Either using huge numbers of people as guinnea pigs to test their new infrastructure (as the topic poster suggests), or something we haven't thought of yet. But just for the hell of it? Probably not.

Re:disk space is cheap.

[ron_ivi]

I'm curious what the cost in disk-space of a hotmail account was back when hotmail launched. I wouldn't be surprised if it's comparable to what Google's offering now.

Re:disk space is cheap.

[untermensch]

So, I'd say they must have some sort of ulterior motive behind this

Don't forget that Google has ads too. They may not be big and flashy but companies will pay a _lot_ of money to have their ad come out on top for certain search keywords.

The same will be true for Gmail. Remeber that they admit that machines will be crawling through our mail to allow them to bring us targeted ads. And if any internet activity is more popular than a google web search, it's email. The sheer volume of email flying around on something with the scope that Google is aiming for, will produce a whole lot of ads.

Re:disk space is cheap.

[tekunokurato]

of course they do. it's a war for your eyes. they make money by your searches and dispatching you to different sites. They will likewise make money off ads shown while you browse your e-mail. if ms introduces a comparable search engine like they suggest they will, google will suffer heavily since people will be much more able to use hotmail and ms search when they're well integrated. by offering e-mail, google will be able to keep you from ever needing to use an ms (or yahoo!) service.

Re:disk space is cheap.

[pen]

The "ulterior motive" is pretty obvious; In fact, it's out in the open -- just read the privacy policy. They will scan your e-mail for keywords and display targeted advertising.

Re:disk space is cheap.

[Louis Guerin]

a community service project?

You're kidding, right? Gmail is four things that I can see, and none of them are community service:

• AdSense fulfilling its destiny, by (eventually) gaining an extra several hundred million pairs of eyes every day
• A massive experiment in distributed computing and data management, the fruits of which will be phenomenally valuable
• The ability to simultaneously put every other free email provider (and by force of ubiquity, every competing search engine) out of business, just in time for an IPO. Yes, Microsoft, Yahoo, that means YOU.

Nope, nothing charitable about it. L

Re:disk space is cheap.

[Louis Guerin]

Yeah, um, four was the number of the beer I was opening. My bad.

I think is that community benefit from the distributed computing exercises of gmail (and like someone said above, whatever they do next) will surely be a benign side-effect, but it certainly isn't the reason or motive for this project. The motive, and what all four of my points above boils down to, is that google craves ubiquity. They revolutionised search technology without becoming a big, evil mega-corporation, and now they're looking at revolutionising consumer email service, and pushing the distributed filesystem boat out much further indeed than anyone else before. They want, more than anything, to be the people who did it first, and to collect the attendant respect, advertising revenue and (eventually) investment.

L

Re:disk space is cheap.

[walt-sjc]

it may just be faster than using Outlook on my desktop

If you are using outlook on our desktop, speed is the least of your concerns... :-)

Re:disk space is cheap.

[danila]

Your figures indicate a cost of 50 cents per account, much less if you oversell (which is harmless, since capacity can be easily added). How much extra ad impressions (and thus ad-clicks) will they have? A lot, and that would quickly pay back the investment. Of course, we ignore the costs of bandwidth and labor, but my point is they are relatively small, even if you give 1Gb of storage.

Best April Fools Joke

[mabinogi]

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.

Of course they won't delete mail...

[Ben Jackson]

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.

Re:Of course they won't delete mail...

[PhotoBoy]

Aside from the "black helicopter" argument, I think another reason for not deleting emails could be for preventing duplication of data. Why store 1 million+ copies of the lastest funny picture everyone is forwarding to each other when you can just store 1 copy and point everyone's email to the same file?

If they want everyone to have 1Gb of storage, tricks like this will help them to reduce the amount of actual disk space they need.

Although what happens to this plan when the next Windows mass mailing worm inserts some random text into each email preventing GMail from creating a single instance of the email I don't know.

I also think that they will compress all the emails stored, a mailbox that is 1Gb when uncompressed may only be a few hundred Mbs in reality thereby saving Google high disk costs.

Privacy isn't such a huge concern

[Biotech9]

'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.

Re:Privacy isn't such a huge concern

[John Starks]

Ha! You don't care about Google being able to read your mail now, but what about when you get into a position of power that someone doesn't like. All they have to do is pay off someone at Google to go through your old email and find something a bit questionable in your past. Had an illicit affair over email? Had physical or emotional problems and discussed it with someone? Used drugs and let people know? Bought enhancing prescription drugs or other "adult" products online and had the bill sent via email? Heck, have you ever expressed an opinion over email that might not make you look good in the public eye? With the kind of storage we're talking about, it'll be in Google's computers as long as they want. And with enough money, people can pay to have it dug up.

Remember, privacy is NOT just for people breaking the law. Privacy is for anyone and everyone that lives in our society. In fact, by posting messages like the one you've posted here, you are doing everyone a disservice. We always must fight for our right to have private lives. Encryption for everyone.

Re:Privacy isn't such a huge concern

[scrm]

what about when you get into a position of power that someone doesn't like. All they have to do is pay off someone at Google to go through your old email and find something a bit questionable in your past.

You're right. But it's been the same deal with Hotmail and the other webmail services for years. Or hosting providers for that matter. Or even ISPs (that could potentially store all the data that you exchange with their servers).

If you're really worried about people digging up dirt on you if you get into a position of power, it's probably better to stay away from the Internet entirely.

whats the problem?

[Prowl]

No-one's going to force you to use the system. If you don't trust it, don't use it.

A useful server would be...

[Albert Sandberg]

torrents.google.com ... it doesn't have to be illegal contents.

Distributed system

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Thats easy...

[Biotech9]

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.

Re:Only one?

[pla]

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?

Concerned about privacy?

[sglane81]

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.

Why is this a problem?

[windside]

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]
--

huge spam shared database?

[tangent3]

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.

Re:Only one? Of course not.

[Clinoti]

As the runaway thought process of the submitter suggested, they may be extremly interested in not who's data or the redunant data they inherit but instead the shear scope and depth of the information that will now become available to them. Let us not forget for a moment that a web search engine is only as good as the data it provides and Google is already one of the largest data collectors on the planet.

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)))

Your mail isn't your mail anymore

[gunga]

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...

Re:Your mail isn't your mail anymore

[the_greywolf]

in fact, the TOS explicitly states that no one reads the emails:

# We serve highly relevant ads and other information as part of the service using our unique content-targeting technology. No human reads your email to target ads or related information to you without your consent.

The project they will tnot be able to announce

[Beautyon]

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.

Re:What? Are we treating this seriously now?

[Finuvir]

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.

it all comes down to one core issue....

[the_greywolf]

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.

Re:Privacy

[Kevin Stevens]

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.

Uh... what privacy concerns?

[MajroMax]

'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.'

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.

Grab your name, quick

[Andy_R]

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

Re:Only one?

[phurley]

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.