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Gmail Commentary and Responses
Phil Windley writes "In his inimitable style, Tim O'Reilly tells us why GMail matters. The piece is entitled, 'The Fuss About GMail' but that doesn't begin to properly identify the real meat of what Tim's saying. Tim does discuss some of the privacy concerns on GMail and why he's not concerned, but he also breaks new ground on why GMail is not just another free email system. For example, Tim talks about how GMail might herald an era of large centralized computing and calls for APIs to allow GMail content to be move back and forth between it and other systems." Reader chris mansley writes "Google is quietly responding all the flak being given to their new email service. They have added a statement to quell the growing list of concerns. No more keeping email forever is at the top of the list. The reviews have been sparse on details and screenshots, but now Google is providing a sneak peek here and here." The only thing I didn't like about Gmail was their apparent intention to keep your mail forever, regardless of your wishes. Since they've now clarified that they don't plan to do that, it doesn't seem like there's much of a problem any more. Yahoo and MSN already link your searches on their respective engines with your account profiles on their respective free email services, and no one seems to care (maybe because no one uses MSN or Yahoo as a search engine these days, but still).
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Which is a good point, right?
Google right now faces a huge issue: "spam" websites designed to bomb it's search engine.
The one common thing about all spam emails is that they have a link to a product page [unless they're *scam* emails, a completely different thing]. Google can use algorithms on mail that gets marked and checked as spam to nerf the page rankings of those webpages.
Why is this important? Because it gives people a free service, gives google advertising money, and has a huge benefit to the search engine.
The best filtering "algorithm" is 5 million users doing your filtering for you. Google doesn't have that right now, because they don't ask anyone to rate their web results. Google stands to gain a huge statistical advantage by incorportating email into their services.
heck they plan on hardware failure, and if a box drops dead, they do not even pull it out of the line up until sometime the following week.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Would be a killer feature. If they could sync my PDA with my Desktop with Thunderbird I'd be thoroughly impressed.
Y! has this functionality for Outlook only; and it's seriously flawed (tasks get truncated at like 20 characters or something - ugh!).
Google certainly has what it takes to pull this off right. Hopefully, they'll provide a way for developers to integrate with the gmail API with external apps (ala T-bird, etc).
You can bet your last dollar that MSNmail, etc will (or already do; I don't use MSN) offer Syncronzation with their desktop apps.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I (often) half-jokingly describe Google as the compendium of all the world's knowledge. But I wonder how long that would continue if they actually did anything evil?
:-)] For awhile it was Yahoo! and Altavista had a turn. Now it's Google.
There are a lot of search engines out there, and while Google is currently at the top of the list, nobody stays there forever. I can remember a time when Netscape was on top [I hear jwz in my head: shut up!
I'm just a lowly coder. I'm not enough of a visionary to know who will be on top in a year. I hope it's Google, but I'm entirely prepared for it to be Amazon or Altavista (again; has anybody noticed their recent changes?) or some brilliant kids from some community college somewhere who have nothing but a hosting account and some algorithms that will change the world.
Here are a few reviews that I was reading
A moratorium around election time to end some of these shenanigans would be appropriate.
1. use a browser/email plugin that can automatically encrypt your email before sending it.
2. use a browser/email decrypter plugin to unencrypt your mail when you read it.
PGP as a form of encryption is commonly available. Theoritically possible but I am not sure how practical it is.
This way all the webmail programs do not know what is being transmitted/stored.
How about other applications that can use the 1GB of storage from gmail?
e.g. online filesystem - files stored as attachments to emails to yourself.
What else?
A few words about privacy and Gmail...
1. Google does not send any email content or other personally identifiable information to advertisers.
What about everybody that's not an advertiser?
2. No humans read any Gmail messages to target advertising or related information that users may see on Gmail.
What about non-humans? I'm assuming computers do "read" every single email that goes through gmail and computers can do a lot more than relate email content to ads.
3. Gmail only shows unobtrusive, targeted ads alongside your messages.
Continuation of #2.
I'm all for google, but these "what you should know" facts are supposed to make us feel better about privacy? Maybe I've missed something, but these statements say nothing except you are going to get ads.
I have an early gmail account, and have used it a little.
The most serious concern is the privacy policy itself.
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/privacy.html
Specifically:
As a standard email protocol, when you send an email from your Gmail account, Gmail includes your email address and user name in the header of the email. Beyond this, we do not disclose your personally identifying information to third parties unless we believe we are required to do so by law or have a good faith belief that such access, preservation or disclosure is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or governmental request, (b) enforce the Gmail Terms of Use, including investigation of potential violations thereof, (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues (including, without limitation, the filtering of spam), (d) respond to user support requests, or (e) protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users and the public.
"governmental request" means pretty much they'll turn over any information withouut a subpoena. I suppose for a free service, you get what you pay for.
Too bad I already posted in this thread - that's worth +5 insightful. Most forums, boards, etc. have archiving. Even Usenet (thanks to Google) - I was able to track posts I sent in 1998.
And GMail will not AFAIK release your emails to the public. So I will/would simply not use this service to send really private mails. But I don't care if there's a private archive somewhere of me writing "happy birthday" to my father.
All Hail Discordia. Hail Eris. Fnord.
Google has a unique cookie on your machine and they can easily track your search queries over time.
With Gmail they could take things to a whole new level without having to break their privacy policy. Imagin having Gmail scanning every e-mail you read (hey, it's just a computer trying to deliver targeted ads) and slowly developing a personal profile with this information and your search query. That's quite a bit of powerful information that google could abuse without you ever knowing about.
Say you buy a few coding books at Amazon, Gmail gets your invoice and notices you bought a couple of books for C++ and one for Java. Then you do a search on google for some Java API reference, Google sees you've bought a book from amazon in the past and decides paid listings are now good enough to show you as real search results.
Don't think it could happen? Yahoo! is testing this right now, if a paid link (same URL) shows up in the natrual search results it's replaced by it's paid link cousin. With a Google IPO, and investors demanding a ROI, it's all the more likely Google would join them.
The real quesiton isn't if you trust Google today, but will you continue to trust them for the next few years. Once you start using a service like Gmail it's hard to switch even if you stop trusting Google. This isn't as true with the Google Search engine, which is why Google wants and needs Gmail (they are going to IPO).
Well, yeah, but do they keep a database table with my search queries next to my cookie ID forever? We know they have the ability to... but do they actually do it?
Paranoia says "of course they do." Trust says "We think they don't."
More screen shots
I can say that I trust them (the founders) pretty much totally. It probably had something to do with the posted signs saying "Don't be evil." All over the place. Its rule number 1. I also use gMail, and while I don't think its as amazing as people have made it out to be, its nice to not worry about inbox limits. If your still concerned about privacy think about this. They have your IP address and every search you've ever run, personally thats more revealing about me than most of my e-mails. Do they log them all in some huge scary database? No. But if you're paranoid enough to worry about bots reading your mail, you should probably think about that potentiality as well. -Ian
The thing to be a cross between web mail and a desktop email client: it is written in several hundred kilobytes of javascript.
Possibilities?
The easiest method of determining whether or not a conspiracy theories site holds any shred of credibility whatsoever (as opposed to being a bunch of mindless paranoid ramblings) is whether or not they mention the CIA. If they do, you can toss that opinion out the window, because it's no longer worth reading. The single most overused parent conspiracy is that of "the CIA is behind it."
However, if you're of the mindset that "anything is possible", try slamming a revolving door.
My words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!
If you look at the very first condition (a), you'll see that they explicitly define a government request as seperate from a "legal process", "law", or "regulation". Clearly, the act of obtaining and presenting a warrant or subpoena falls under the category of "legal process", which is identified as being different from a "government request".
As well, notice that that Google explicitly says that they will turn over personal information to "third parties". That could mean anyone-- your boss, your teacher, your parents, the RIAA, or even your Rabbi. The simple fact of the matter is that the only way to get privacy in e-mail is to run your own servers and only send and receive encrypted e-mail messages.
I'm not saying that Google is evil-- though they do admit that they will be more than helpful in providing anyone with your personal information if the request satisfies any of the above conditions which, in my opinion, are overly broad -- but I do think that any organisation that really cared about your privacy would have a simple policy: they would not turn over information unless the request was made through the legal process.
Is there any technical reason why you couldn't write some clever code that would allow you to mount GMail as a networked drive, just like Konqueror does with its multi-protocol support?
Files would be stored as attachments, along with a file allocation table of some sort. Send a mail to yourself to write a file; delete the mail to erase it.. but all totally transparent to you. It'd be a bit slow, but some clever caching/buffering could take care of that.
You could theoretically get it to span across several accounts to store files larger than a gig. Just add un/pw's to a config file to increase your storage capacity.
Even if they don't end up providing pop3/smtp, you can still just script the html sessions like YahooPOPs! does.
But how often will they be asked to hand over their records? If it's a small ISP, then this won't happen frequently. If they're a large ISP, then it could happen more frequently. My data there would be searched incidentally, because it's much easier to search everybody than search a few specific people.
If they're a really big email provider, like MSN, AOL, Yahoo or Google, they'll be asked to help law enforcement quite often, and my personal data will be searched incidentally quite often. And Google's intention is to make such searching much, much easier than any of its competitors.
You do the math. Let's say an officer is looking for something quite specific, and his query is well crafted, having a false positive rate of 0.001 only. Now he applies the query to one million people...
he then continous:
1. Giving users a lot of space. Okay, this isn't rocket surgery. Disks have been getting cheaper for a long time now. Do you honestly expect to see other large (and even mid-tier) web mail providers not increasing their offerings to match or surpass those of Gmail? It seems like a no-brainer to me.
2. Proving virtual folders, conversations, search-based message lists, or whatever you want to call them. So we've got threading (not new) plus virtual folders (not new) in a single mail interface. Well, stop the presses! It's amazing to think that no mail clients have offered this functionality in the last 5-7 years! Oh, wait. They have.
3. Adding context-sensitive ads to your mail. Yippie! I'm gonna switch right away so I can start seeing SPAM that I cannot filter even in my previously non-spam mail. Sign me up!
see http://jeremy.zawodny.com/
-- for undocumented cisco commands, take a peek @ dotu
We had a guest the other night (I'm taking a high-tech entrepreneurship and venture initiation class this quarter), who basically said that after they sold part of the company (in the form of a venture stake for about 15%, and another further 15% to the employees in the form of stock and stock option grants), he suddenly had the fiduciary duty to maximize return to his shareholders. Even though they were not the majority (he and the other founder held 70%), as a member of the board and a corporate officer, he was legally obligated to consider actions that he, as a founder, didn't think were good in the long term.
One example. Google sells 30% of the company. Some guy (Bill Gates for example) comes along and offers 6 times the current share price for Google stock in an acquisition deal. For that kind of return for their shareholders, Google's board cannot ignore the offer and tell Bill to go away. Google's majority owners may end up not voting to sell, but their time, the time of the board, corporate officers, etc. would be eaten up having to deal with this.
Think about this for a moment. Now that open standards have come into play with regards to all our communications on the internet (HTML,XML,TCP/IP, etc..), Google has now put itself into position to be the predominant application provider- anything you want could be through the browser, and you have all the information flowing on the internet at your fingertips.
Plus, it will commoditize the desktop- who the fuck cares what OS you run, as long as you get to gMail or gNews or Google? At that point, Microsoft would not survive long.. how can a software company that requires revenue survive against a free operating system? since the free alternatives for their OS and office suite are becoming competitive, it leaves multimedia as it's only thread of survival... something the FOSS world needs to simplify and embrace.
Looks like a great idea to me. Go Google, and to their upcoming competitors! Of course, I maybe overly optimistic.
There's a lot of negative Gmail press out there.
Too much negative press even.
Are we looking at Microsoft/Yahoo/Others putting a lot of effort into making sure these criticisms make the news?
I'm no Linux fan-boy (I use and appreciate Microsoft software), but I wouldn't put efforts such as those past any company who had a financial interest in the development or lack of it. And because of that, I'd be inclined to give Google a bit more benefit of the doubt here.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Of course, you did not literally spread FUD -- just information, but I believe that now, while Google is inexplicably under attack - perhaps by those who could know better - we need to actively defend Google as the epitome of what companies on the internet can be.
If you read the link from the story and understand it, you'll know that you have nothing to worry about: Google's software is parsing your messages as you open them for keywords so they can show you ads. This is something their search engine does already, and, as far as I know, nobody has been traced and arrested via their cookie because they looked up "nude kids" or "dirty bomb diagrams." And if you're really paranoid, just turn off cookies: they aren't mandated. Every site that uses cookies gives you a "unique user id." If you want to whinge about "unique user IDs," we can talk about social security numbers or palladium hardware IDs or the Passport service.
That claim is quite obviously intended as sarcasm. It mocks the following Craig Silverstein quote:
Then the site goes on to ask (for the truly daft, this is where the sarcasm comes in):It's nothing like what you are suggesting. You just kneejerked into some kind of I-MUST-SHOW-SLASHDOT-I-KNOW-ABOUT-THE-UNIX-EPOCH mode.
Yes, that's what I ask myself: why should I switch to Gmail? What are the advantages to outweigh the disadvantages?
Let's see: so far I have got as the advantages:
- 1GB space for mail
- slick web interface (so they claim) with threaded view etc.
- access your mail everywhere, as long as you have web access
and the disadvantages are:
- 1GB storage? Wow, cool. I've got a 250GB hard disk right here.
- ONLY web access. No POP3 or whatever. Your mail stays there, unless you forward it to a second mail account which allows you to store your mail locally (and why would you need Gmail then in the first place?). If you've got no web access (say, your DSL modem is defective or your ISP has trouble), you've got no way to access your stored mails.
- I have yet to see a web-based mail application which is as easy/quick to use as a standard one. Sorting mails, full text search, printing, exporting mails into a different file format - sorry, but I just cannot believe that Gmail will be better than Eudora or whatever.
- data storage issues. Sorry, but I want to store my important mail HERE, on my own machine, where I can make SURE that the data won't be lost and where I can make regular backups on CD or whatever MYSELF.
- privacy issues. Nobody reads my personal mail. NOBODY. I am aware that any mail travels through countless servers on its way to my computer, but why should I sign up for a service which is based on reading its customers mails and then sending ads based on what it has read (i.e. sends you spam you cannot filter out)? How long before the user profile data walks out of the Google offices and gets used by other companies "associated" with Google? They have everything there in their hands - name, address, age and every private mail you ever sent or received via Google! As well as all the email addresses of everybody you ever exchanged mails with. How long before police etc. order Google to run queries against the data? "Hey, please run a query and give us the addresses of everybody who has mail with this-and-that warez URL!" Oh, your buddy sent you a mail half a year ago and told you "hey dude, check out this cool server"? And you wrote him back "thanks, looks cool - check out this mp3 ftp here"? Sorry, expect an official visit real soon.
No, I see absolutely NO reason why I should sign up for Gmail. Nothing they offer is so incredibly good that I would gladly give up my email privacy for it. Just use GMX or whatever and download your mail to your machine - that way you can STILL check your mail via the web interface when you're not at home.
Generally, the files I want to backup are only the documents I create (I'm a writer). There are not that many that I generate a week, they're not big compared to things such as mp3s, and they compress well. But I'd like to have a means to automatically backup my work easily and safely.
It should be easy enough to write a script that zips up all document files in specified directories and mail it to my Gmail account as an attachment. Of course, you could encrypt it if you want more security. Then set up the script to be run once or twice a day. It should be easy enough to make most backups to be incremental with only the recent changes, and every so many days make a full backup.
Of course, using Gmail for backup depends on the reliabilty of Google, and it's quite possible that if things go wrong in Gmail, you may have no means of recovering the email with the backups. So, having an alternative place to store the backups on occasion would be a good idea. Maybe Hotmail and Yahoo mail could be used for that.
I've had a beta account for about a week now, and ironically enough I find the search feature the most lacking.
You can only do whole word searches... if you want to search for emails from your friend Bob Chuzzlewit-Pumblechook, and you have ten friends named Bob, you can't shorten your search by searching for "Chuzz", as that will return nothing.
Kind of ironic, since on any other email client you can search for partial words.
We need to trust Google, and others with similar promises, to progress with our interconnected infosphere. In order to trust people with material this valuable, we subject them to audit. We audit banks, we audit factories, we audit farms, we even audit gameshows. We need to audit Google. Google needs to be auditable. Their source code, while proprietary, needs to be audited by an auditor without other financial interest in Google, unlike the Enron/Anderson incest. And who audits the auditors? Other auditors - like a web of psychoanalysts, or peer-reviewing scientists, the web of trust must be at all levels, and open to verification on demand.
--
make install -not war
I use Google's search toolbar constantly. After a few days of using Gmail, I feel like Google is doing their best to make me even more dependent on searching (which in turn makes me dependent on their company).
The "Search Mail" box is always at the top of your page, on any screen, and since Gmail encourages you not to delete anything, the Search box becomes the easiest way to find stuff. (If there's a way to sort alphabetically by sender or subject, I haven't figured it out.) I think if I used Gmail regularly, it would make my brain even more more search-reliant in my daily life. It's one thing to have a cookie on my computer, but it's another thing to feel like they're messing with my brain. THAT is a privacy concern.
- Just because a corporate entity behaves one way today, does not mean it will behave another way next week. Public offerings and bankruptcy courts, in particular, can change how an entity operates. In fact I once worked for an organization which treated its employes well for 105 years based on unwritten promises, then over 3 years voided all those promises and dumped thousands out on the street with no contractual protection. Oops. And you may also wish to look into what happened to the data collected by those dotcoms under privacy policies when the bankruptcy courts took charge of the databases. Double oops.
You can disagree with those points if you wish. But you can't ignore them.The Patriot Act prohibits a subpoena-ee of any terrorism investigation from disclosing that its data have been taken to anybody for any reason, under penalty of prosecution. That's why many libraries are changing their checkout systems to no longer maintain circulation history. Google might be providing that informaton to the FBI right now and you would not know. In fact, Google might be operated by the NSA (I won't say FBI to keep it at least somewhat believable ;-) ) and you would not know.
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One good thing I see that can come out of this is our ability to use Gmail to Mirror GNU content, because their server farms wouldn't be bogged down as easily, and it's free as in beer, they can go ahead and save as many copies of the programs as they want, doesn't invade my privacy