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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).
If you've got a trust-nobody mentality then what Google has to say means nothing, they're going to rip up their privacy policy and send every e-mail that goes through their system directly to John Ashcroft using their PageRank sorting technology to indicate which e-mails are most relavant to his desire to repeal every amendment in numbered order...
Of course, if you're sane, you trust Google because if they really wanted to screw the world over, they simply could decide that since their search engine is so good, everybody needs to pay $25 a month to keep accessing it... or decide to start logging all search queries to a user-specific cookie... or just take their bat and ball and go home. They've already got enough power to mess with us even worse than Gmail could be, and they've yet to be caught abusing any of that power or going back on their word.
That's how trust is really built... by letting them have the ability to screw up and seeing that they don't manage to do so. I'd certainly trust my e-mail with Google more so than I'd trust some of the other major "free e-mail" services out there.
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.
Isn't this true? What is the difference?
I like this approach, it makes you think about what you say. Maybe some emails shouldn't be sent. If you have to worry about it, you shouldn't do it.
Jeoin
I think they've clarified they privacy policy to a level that us geeks should easily be able to understand...
When you hit "delete", more often than not in computer land, your data is not immediately rendered unrecoverable. In most operating systems, deleted files are ushered over to a "holding bin" for a final clear-out command to really get rid of them in case we want to change our mind. Once the OS finally lets go of the file, the file system often takes the short cut of just removing the index pointers to the file and/or marking the space as "unused", but leaving the data still spinning on the drive until something eventually wants to use that space... let's face it, a "quick format" doesn't have time to hit every track on the drive, it's taking a shortcut and that's what makes it "quick".
So, really, they're just saying that in order to make their magical mega-system work, "delete" isn't going to mean "Expunge it all right away!" but simply "Put in the pile that'll be discarded the next time the garbage collection process comes by." Therefore, they'll need to keep your "deleted" e-mails for an undisclosed length of time... they don't intend on keeping it forever, although they have to word the privacy policy in a way that might be misread that way because to do less just wouldn't be being honest.
If you don't have root access to the e-mail system where you work, you don't really know if "delete really means delete" on that system either. Your boss may in fact have access to your e-mail... you might as well assume that they do unless you know otherwise.
I'm really impressed with how Google has handled themselves since their inception. They have certainly been innovative, but most importantly they employ things that aren't seen enough in today's business world: openness and integrity.
I'm inherently paranoid (or, perhaps more appropriately, private) and always take things with a grain of salt - especially when it's coming from a business the size of Google.
That said, I don't blame Google for their desire to recoup costs by generating targeting advertisement. I'm very much impressed with how open they have been about the procedures they will use to actually target the ads. With this recent letter that so quickly and openly answers concerns made public recently, I'm happy to say here is a company that has been widly successful - all while being true gentlemen.
At least with an e-mail service, Google will be standing on two feet when this happens. People will want to check their GMail no matter what search they are using. Google isn't even close to the financial power of Microsoft right now, so it needs to prepare for the attack...
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?
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
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.