I see 222 posts about this story, but no one has said it yet. GMail today machine-reads your email in order to provide contextual ads (in the right hand pane next to your mail). In order to serve those ads they must need to show customers statistics proving the relevance and targeting of ads, so they're obviously keeping a record of what was said versus what ads were shown, click through rates for those ads, etc. That is in addition to the actual emails they keep on their servers, and this data would persist even after I delete an email since its likely to reside in some ads database. GMail does not even let me opt out of seeing these contextual ads so I don't even have an option of doing what this company (Pudding Media) will let its users do - opt out of this invasion of privacy. Please don't tell me that multi-gazillion dollar corporation X is more likely to use or abuse its data than multi-gazillion dollar corporation Y - its well known in the relevant circles that certain federal agencies with TLAs for names have free access to the Google databases. If you want to know more about that you can read an earlier Slashdot story about Google's refusal to provide the DOJ with search queries as requested.
Slashdot Mirror
I see 222 posts about this story, but no one has said it yet. GMail today machine-reads your email in order to provide contextual ads (in the right hand pane next to your mail). In order to serve those ads they must need to show customers statistics proving the relevance and targeting of ads, so they're obviously keeping a record of what was said versus what ads were shown, click through rates for those ads, etc. That is in addition to the actual emails they keep on their servers, and this data would persist even after I delete an email since its likely to reside in some ads database. GMail does not even let me opt out of seeing these contextual ads so I don't even have an option of doing what this company (Pudding Media) will let its users do - opt out of this invasion of privacy. Please don't tell me that multi-gazillion dollar corporation X is more likely to use or abuse its data than multi-gazillion dollar corporation Y - its well known in the relevant circles that certain federal agencies with TLAs for names have free access to the Google databases. If you want to know more about that you can read an earlier Slashdot story about Google's refusal to provide the DOJ with search queries as requested.