Slashdot Mirror
Forbes Reviews Google's Gmail [updated]
An anonymous reader submits "Forbes.com has what looks to be the first hands-on review of Google's forthcoming Gmail service. Aside from the 1-gigabyte storage, the searching features sound pretty useful for what the writer calls 'email packrats' which I think fits me pretty well. But I can't say I agree with the writer's opinion that privacy fears, as discussed this Slashdot thread, about the Gmail service are 'overblown.' Still and all, I'm curious to try it myself and see what I think." Update: 04/13 00:55 GMT by T : notEA writes "A California state senator is drafting legislation to block Google from releasing Gmail. Seems kind of silly, since all anti-spam filters read your messages anyway."
I think Google is being VERY forthcoming with information and making it clear what they do and do not do...
Why the uproar... if you're against having them sort your mail and deliver ads based on content, don't sign up!
E-mail is an inherently insecure medium. For the most part messages are sent in the clear, meaning almost no attempt is made to obfuscate the contents of a message from someone with prying eyes. All Internet service providers store e-mail on a server in order to deliver it to you. Technicians with time on their hands and lousy ethics can--if they want--read your mail. ...
Google insists quite clearly in its privacy policy that "No human reads your mail to target ads or other information without your consent." The process by which it pushes ads at its users is fully automated. Fears about privacy problems inherent with the Gmail service are, in our opinion, overblown.
All of the privacy fears surounding Gmail are based on Google breaching their own privacy policy, which would be an unethical violation of trust. But, since e-mail is unencrypted, every e-mail provider on the face of the Earth has the same ability to breach that trust, including MSN Hotmail, Yahoo, Earthlink, and whoever/whatever you trust your e-mail to.
So, when it comes down to it, the bottom line question is, do you trust Google to do what they say they're going to do? If you don't... just who are you going to trust to handle your e-mail?
If your tin foil hat is firmly on, you can't use e-mail at all. Most people will just not e-mail you rather than jump through security certificate hoops. That means their ISP's SMTP server could be logging everything that's sent from them to you, and you'd be powerless to stop that.
Don't forget the MP3, SVCD, and Warez sites that will also likely exploit the service.
The potential abuse schemes are so many in number that there's no way Google is going to release Gmail into the wild without having defenses in place. To do so would be the ultimate blunder in Web service history, it's just not like Google to do something like that.
Remember, the system right now is in a much talked about yet still closed beta state right now. How they're going to even hand out accounts remains yet to be seen.
Just because they allow 1 GB of historic e-mail storage doesn't mean they can't throtle users to 1 MB per day and make them take over 3 years to get up to that GB... there's so many simple fixes on the table that Google's gonna grab a few of them.
Google:
No human reads your mail to target ads or other information without your consent
What about programs that target ads to you based on your email or ``other'' information? The way the article is worded infers that this is happening. What is to prevent google from coming up with human-readable statistics of what email messages a person or group of people are receiving or sending?
I wouldn't be so sure about that...
Just do a search on Google and see how for any vaguely x-rated term, a whole host of fake listings appear.
If they haven't solved this in the six+ months this has been happening, I wouldn't give them full credence for their ability to stop warez action.
You must explicitly request Google by name to use their services. You can't be unaware of their existence like you can with Microsoft or Apple (comes with the computer).
Google does not surreptitiously install spyware on your system and record everything you do on your computer, requiring you to meticulously hunt down and remove its components or employ third party scumware removal utilities.
All you have to do stop using Google is to stop typing their name.
Switching to Google did not require a 15MB download, or a registration process, or a credit card. As the average joe, you've invested very little in Google, and you can replace them as simply as you can type a 4-8 letter word.
The only thing that keeps you typing their name is that you believe they're the best way to find the answer. Once you stop believing that, once a significant group of people become fed up, Google is finished. They know this, you should too.
In fact, type "search engine" and Google will tell you about altavista, lycos, excite, alltheweb, etc.
People are complaining because google is scanning their email with a computer. We have our private email scanned all the time, for viruses and for spam. In fact, many of the spam based filtering approaches look at the words and their structure and generate statistical models based on that for the purposes of identifying legit email from illigit.
So google will scan to add ads to my email. This info wasn't buried on page 200 in small legalese, but was in their FAQ! Google has been very forthcoming with how they will scan and store individuals email. Given that they are upfront about this, some of the privacy groups seem to literally have gone off the wall.
People say, ads are obnoxious in my email. Clearly you havn't used hotmail recently. They are in the frame and in the email! Google invented the unobtrusive ad.
Compared to the hotmail and yahoo accounts people will be coming from (have you read your SBC/Yahoo terms of service recently), it is hard to see how google will be so much worse for them, even from a privacy standpoint.
While the airlines are giving my flight info to private contractors to profile me so that I can't travel anymore, without telling me, google posts how they will scan my email to advertise products to me.
What makes people think that Hotmail, Yahoo, and other free-mail providers don't intentionally or accidentally archive, parse, or otherwise "invade" their users' privacy to some degree?
In any event, as long as people are sending clear text email across the net, it's all being read and stored by _somebody_.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
There's a reasonable likelihood that yourname@Gmail.com will still be working 5 or 10 years from now, when you'll really need the 1 gig for the accumulated emails. I'd put the probability of "these guys" being around 10 years from now at approximately zero.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
"I get 10GB (email+web hosting) for $10/month."
;-)
Is that guaranteed.... like say early cable modem providers "guaranteed"?
I'm sure if all of their customers actually used 10GB they wouldn't think it's so cheap. Say they use 200GB disks [309$ CDN locally...] they would have to have 19 customers for 2 months to pay it off.
Doesn't sound like much, but what if they need say 10 drives to accomodate their customers? Chances are that's at least two computers [I dunno how that translates into U/2U] which means more money, etc... I found a 1U co-locate for 150$/mo. Assuming two 2U spots costs say 500$ you need at least 50 customers each month to turn bank (they will also consume 3 200GB disks...). Presumably you will want to give them say 10GB traffic too. Well that's another 5$ per user or 250$...
So right now you're upto ~750$ per month. But you're only making 500$ a month... so you cheap on the disks cuz they won't fill it up. And you cheap on the bandwidth budget cuz they won't fill it up....
Then when they do you accidentally exercise the "I'm bigger than you clause" where you say "unlimited meant reasonably unlimited and reasonably means you are owned."
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
If you think even a few percent of Google's customers will come close to 1GB of email within the first few years then you overestimate the average email user. Even if they did, using an aggressive compression algorithm they can cut store a full account (1GB of uncompressed email) down by at least 50%, if not to 20-25%. Since it has to be email then it has to follow normal email encoding standards (7bit, base64 encoding for binary, etc)
I think the power users are those who will subscribe to lists that they want to use for reference, but do not actually read on a regular basis. And guess what Google will do with such a list message? They will likely store one copy on the server, and a pointer from every account which received that message - perhaps with a small diff file to recover address differences, etc.
In the end, hard drive space is cheap They can set up a fully backed up terabyte array for under $1000. That terabyte array will support thousands of 'average' users, and hundreds of 'power' users.
The biggest deal is the searching technology. To search all that they'll need several dedicated servers with their own indexes. Chances are email will be auto-indexed as it comes in so searches always seem fresh.
In the end it's not going to need even a few percent of your excessive estimate. But if it did, you know it'd be worth it since they'd have extremely exacting profiles on their users and the people they contact, and advertising that is so tightly focused can be nothing but profitable.
The concept of indexing each email as it's stored provides a powerful opportunity for spam filtering, compression, and copy storage. If two messages are 90% similar then they may be from a list, they may be spam, or they may be valid. Create a diff file, store the diffs on each account, store the 'main' message the diffs were created from, and file the messages into the spam holder or regular folding, tagging and indexing as you go.
The fact is that the more users they have, the more powerful this system becomes. I'm drooling just thinking about the possibilities... I wouldn't mind working for them, I think.
Of course, this is mad speculation, but it just makes sense givin that they are an indexing company. Their main product is not searching, but indexing. Searching is simply a by-product.
-Adam
All spam filters "read" your email. AOL, Hotmail, anything with SpamAssasin, any service with spam protection needs to "read" messages to analyze them.
Oh, and about this:
..."residual copies of email may remain on our systems for some time"...
They use computers with hard drives! They can't guarantee that data is completely shredded. I'm sure they're not performing a secure wipe of every sector containing portions of an email once it's deleted.
If you started looking, most of the privacy "concerns" with Google's service apply to almost any email service. It's a huge fuss over nothing.
-- If you can read this, you are too close to my signature.