Slashdot Mirror
Privacy Complaint Against Google's GMail Service
CRCates writes "Privacy groups in the UK have filed a complaint against Google over its new Gmail service. Privacy groups said they were concerned about Google's ability to link a user's personal details, supplied in the Gmail registration process, to Web-surfing behaviour through the use of a single cookie for its search and mail services. "
If someone has a problem with the way the advertising is done, then they shouldn't use it. It is not like Google is hiding all of this information from their users.
All of this complaining and bickering for a service that is not yet released...
Trying is the First Step to Failing --Homer Simpson
"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," Google's Gmail says in its privacy and terms of use sections.
/you/, but not to /us/.
:)
/that/ different in Europe?
snip
"If a person deletes an email, he should be confident that email is actually deleted," said Maurice Westerling, co-founder of Bits of Freedom, another privacy interest group, based in the Netherlands.
MS Exchange has settings for the email retention period. If you delete something from your mailbox in Outlook, then empty your Trash folder, it's effectively gone from your view and you've no way to retrieve it. It is however stored in Exchange for as long as the administrators wish to hang onto it (and that "deleted" email is, indeed, backed up and restorable).
If you shift-delete an object out of your Inbox, using that wonderful permanent-kill technique that the tech-savvy thinks protects and anonymizes their email... it's stored for the email retention period listed by the sysadmins, is backed up, and is restorable. It looks very dead to
(fyi, the only real way around this is to edit your Outlook client so that you can get the Recover Deleted Items option on every object in your inbox [as opposed to just the Recycle Bin], then habitually view -- and purge -- that information on a schedule that is more frequent than the one used for our backups. That'd work.)
Anyway, the shorter point is, this kind of thing happens. The reason is happens is liability. If a criminal organization is using Google's GMail system for planning a robbery, or if a terrorist group decides they want to attack rail systems in Europe and wants to do so by using random public terminals to sign into email accounts that someone else hosts, it's a problem. If law enforcement comes looking and Google has to say "Oh, sorry - we respect privacy so much that we absolutely and permanently delete all traces of all email the second you touch the delete object!", it will not be a pleasant thing. The investigators will not be happy.
Alternate question; do you really think that your email is permanently gone from Yahoo! and Hotmail?
Do you really think they can't restore to an arbitrary point in time?
Do you think they wouldn't turn that info over to law enforcement in a heartbeat if a court order came down?
Are the rules
I got excited about this almost ten years ago. I installed PGP in my email client, made my keyring (or whatever it's called) and sent a few test messages to myself. After a couple of years in which time I never found anyone who even understood the idea, I gave up, never bothered to reinstall when I moved to a new PC.
Why do you get to decide unilaterally when the deal is off?
"Defending Google" here is defending the right to enter into agreements. You, apparently, want to be protected from your decisions by being able to change the terms of service if you don't like them at a later date and you want the force of law, through regulation, to enforce your preference.
You don't need regulation, you need to be responsible for your decisions.
Your concerns might be valid, I don't know. But, and I know you are sick to death of this, if you feel this way, "DON'T USE IT THEN". That would be a way of 'telling a company what the consumer wants'. But, you don't really want to tell a company what the consumer wants, you want to force the company to provide a service that you want.