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On The Privacy Subtleties Of GMail, Other Webmail
Brad Templeton writes "After talking with Google folks and learning about E-mail privacy law from EFF (join!) lawyers, I have written a new essay on the privacy subtleties of GMail and other advanced webmail applications. Some of the fear has been overdone, but there are surprising issues due to the fact that the ECPA, written almost 20 years ago, wasn't prepared for fancy e-mail offerings like GMail. I issue a call for Google to encrypt your mail to avoid these issues."
I've been using Gmail and I find it incredibly useful. My favs:
1. The keyboard shortcuts: allows me to use web based email the way I use Pine.. do everything without touching the mouse even once.
2. The tracking of emails to display them as "conversations".. so neat, it looks almost obvious.
3. The much griped about text ads are totally unobtrusive, and (faint, faint) they do not even appear on all email pages. Google probably has some algorithm to decide which conversations can get targeted ads.
4. The address autocomplete - no more clicking on email addresses in a popup window to insert them. It works exactly like a proper client application (as different from a browser app)
5. To reply to an email, all I have to do is click in a textbox below the email and presto! the compose widgets are there.. great time saver.. and you can see the conversation on top.
and the best part..
6. The interface is so clean and clutter free - it has google written all over it!
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
Imagine, for example, a phone company that halves your rates in exchange for being allowed to sell transcripts of your phone conversations
Where did you get the ridiculous idea that Google is selling your email transcripts? Google is inserting text ads (automatically) in your email - the advertisers do not get to see your email.
Also, Google has mentioned that it won't be inserting ads indiscriminately - you can trust them to be intelligent enough not insert casket ads!
I've been using Gmail and I can vouch for the fact that the text ads do not even appear in all the pages - just a few emails - and not obtrusively like Yahoo! or Hotmail which put their ads right at the bottom of emails which get sent out - here only you see the ads which you may not even notice since they are just tiny text.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
As far as I can tell, Gmail's biggest problem is this: "Dear son, your grandma died suddenly. Details on the funeral ASAP. Call me." On the right hand side, google text ads hawking caskets, flowers, funeral homes. It's tacky, to say the least, and I have little respect for people who are willing to let ads into their private lives to this degree.
.5% clickthrough rate aren't welcome on Google's search engine... and a 1% CTR is demanded for ads that want to be displayed elsewhere on Google's network.
Google's proven smart about this kind of thing in the past. Ads that don't get at least a
I'm pretty sure that non-socially-acceptable ads will get thrown out of GMail. If people don't want to hear from any sponsor in a certain situation, GMail will react and not show ads when that situation comes up in the future.
Google AdSense takes the policy that when it doesn't have any likely-to-be-clicked ads to show, it mails in PSAs or lets the webmaster do something else with the space. They don't randomly guess four ads from the database in a random effort, they just mail it in.
So, the only way casket ads will show up in an e-mail thread about the death of grandma will be if people are actually clicking on such ads...
"As for inappropriate or insensitive targeting... I haven't noticed this to a be a problem yet. I sent a couple of test mails to my Gmail account, focusing linguistically on the theme of death and dying, and Gmail "outsmarted" me each time. That is to say, when I sent e-mails about "dying to see funny jokes... man, that last one had me out of breath, on the floor, and about ready to die!..." Gmail smartly showed ads for Joke stuff. When I wrote a note (thankfully untrue!) of equal length about a relative dying ("Isn't it funny how the doctors didn't notice anything strange about Aunt Martha before she died?... You have to laugh at the incompetence of medical staff nowadays..."), Gmail showed no ads whatsoever. I'm sure there will be instances in which Gmail's targeting results in ironic or even unpleasant juxtapositions, but it seems to me that this should be rare, and in the end probably no more likely than the scenario of a recently-widowed woman seeing an untargeted but equally jarring ad for "Single? Looking to date?" ad in her Yahoo mail."