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

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.

[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.

[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

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.

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.

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.

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: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.