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Posted by Steven Wu on Tuesday, April 13 @ 10:47:47 EDT
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There's been a lot of press about how Google's beta Gmail email system invades users' privacy because (1) Google will scan incoming emails and insert contextual text ads, (2) Google will store emails on their own servers for years, (3) Google is preventing permanent deletion of emails, (4) etc. etc. (See here, here, here, here.)
Naturally, some people have already raised a good point: If Gmail is open about its (anti)privacy practices, and you agree to sign up despite full awareness of those practices, what’s your complaint? This isn’t like Carnivore reading your emails without your permission, or the Department of Justice snooping through your library records. If you don't like what Gmail is doing, take advantage of the free market and go to one of its competitors. The market will solve.
But maybe that's precisely the problem. These privacy concerns could stem not so much from Gmail itself as from the slippery slope it represents. Assume that Gmail is financially successful, and context-based ad placement becomes the only way for an email-provider to make a profit. The fear may be that the entire market will convert to these privacy-intruding practices in order to make buck. When the incentives for private actors are entirely in the direction of invading users' privacy, the market will decidedly not solve.
Whether such a slippery slope will occur is, of course, an empirical question. I for one am not convinced that the email market cannot sustain a provider who will protect users' privacy, particularly if (1) users are willing to "pay" a premium for their privacy, and (2) the provision of email is accepted as a money-losing aspect of larger profitable enterprises. Of course, a lot of the hubbub about Gmail also derives from a justifiable sense of entitlement users have to their privacy. To that extent that such people will only be satisfied by a mandatory rule preventing intrusion into their email, even a successful market will not be sufficient.
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Re: Gmail, Privacy, Markets (Score: 1) by JamesGrimmelmann on Tuesday, April 13 @ 10:59:16 EDT (User Info | Send a Message) http://www.laboratorium.net | I tend to take Google's side in this debate -- certainly I think the California legislation [news.ft.com] to ban Gmail is a horrible idea. (On the other hand, Google could stand to be clearer in its Terms of Service if its intent is as honorable as it claims.)
Privacy isn't just a matter of individual decisions, though. There's also the Plaxo problem: my decision not to care about privacy hurts your ability to stay private, if I start blabbling your PII in an unprotected place. People punch their friends' phone numbers and addresses into Plaxo without a second thought.
In the Gmail case, assuming the worst from Google, I don't necessarily need to sign up for Gmail to have my privacy breached. If enough of my friends sign up, and start exchanging email with me from there, Google can data-mine me pretty nicely based on my correspondence with all of you. |
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Re: Gmail, Privacy, Markets (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Tuesday, April 13 @ 18:55:19 EDT | Am I missing something? If Google doesn't keep track of what ads you're sent, or what keywords triggered those ads, whose privacy is violated? Some sentient third party has to eventually learn my personal information for my privacy to have been breached. If I'm reading the descriptions correctly, the ads in Gmail violate privacy in the same way as placing adult magazines on the top shelf at convenience stores does -- if I can see the nudie mags, it must mean I'm an adult! The store has dispatched information to me based on my age! Oh no!
The fuzziness about whether deleted gmail messages are really gone freaks me out, though. |
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The issues with deletion... (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Wednesday, April 14 @ 03:06:18 EDT | Frankly, I'm not sure about the problems with deletion?
For one, they could (at least in theory) offload some of the static content to read-only media. You don't delete those. They're just like the old CDs of data many throw out without thinking.
For another, even your home computer NEVER deletes anything until specifically ordered to. What it does is to mark that bit of the hard drive "unused" so that other files can be stored over it (removing it). But even then, sophisticated equipment can recover damn near every revision of all the data. The DOD has a standard of overwriting the data several times with encrypted jibberish; this is about the best you can do. Also, some other algorithms on data structures are lazy in a similar way--it's just not always worth it to reclaim trivial amounts of unused space. Hell, when one of the small rack-mounter computers at Google dies (which is quite common) they don't even bother to replace it; the network as a whole just goes on and they add new, live ones as needed. It's a waste of time to track down the dead servers.
So I feel that they're just being honest with us here. I intend to cut them some slack until such time as they give me a reason not to.
What I AM more worried about, though, is if the FBI/NSA/whoever could force them to let them go on "fishing expeditions" ... e.g. search all email for these keywords ... simply because they could do so (actually, I'm not 100% sure they could, but it might not be unreasonable).
Actually, this is more likely something the RIAA, etc. might do if Google were used for copyright infringement... because they *could* ferret them all out, they might argue that they *have* to (and to turn all of them over to the RIAA/MPAA/etc.) ...
Maybe a lawyer could comment on that last bit & assage my fears? :) |
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Re: Gmail, Privacy, Markets (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Thursday, April 15 @ 14:57:04 EDT | Several of the news sources note the strict European guidelines:
"Gmail may violate Europe's privacy laws because it stores messages where users cannot permanently delete them. Europe's privacy protection laws give consumers the right to retain control over their communications. "
So what about Amazon? It tracks purchases, interests, etc - what constitutes a communication? It suggests purchases based on prior purchases (keywords, genre's and the like). I'm not sure I see a brightline difference.
Does anyone know how 'communications' have been defined by law/judgment in the EU? You can't 'take back' having visited a site and having your IP address recorded and having that information stored indefinately - is that significantly less intrusive?
I guess the issue is a question of degree...
Degree being the ease with which one's communications can be constructed into a representation of an individual's (perceived) thoughts.
-AdamThomas |
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Re: Gmail, Privacy, Markets (Score: 1) by PC-Encrypt on Friday, April 30 @ 10:27:16 EDT (User Info | Send a Message) | Users can easily protect their privacy. Simple and free.
Type your Gmail then click the "A-LOCK" icon to encrypt.
http://www.pc-encrypt.com/_site/alock/index.mhtml
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