Big Google is watching you
Seattle Times Columnist Charles Bermant tells you about Gmail, Google's new email service. It's known that Google scans your email.
There are a lot of reasons some people will hate this, on principle. It is an invasion of privacy, a sneaky way to sell you something, proof that no matter how hip a company may seem, when they get a little success, they start acting like Big Brother.
I conclude with Bermant on the relevance of this issue. Google's search engine algorythms are applied to my email. So what? Sure I like privacy. But seriously, do you really believe you've got privacy when you're surfing the web?
When the web was honored with the omnipotent label e-commerce not too long ago, and everything was about "How do I make money with it?", everybody was concerned about Cookies. They were considered extremely bad, spies on your hard disk, little agents that check your user behaviour and send back that information to the mothership, so next time you're visiting Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, you'll see banners based on that information about you. Bermant continues:
It also bears notice that the same scanning technology is what separates out the spam. And it's not like an actual person is reading our messages, sitting in a dark room and saying, "Charlie is writing about leather, so I'll just hook him up with the Coach Web page." It's done by a machine at the speed of light that doesn't take the time to examine daily minutiae.
There's no other notion but "What's the biggie" in this article. And that's how much of a matter it is--to me at least.
- Henning von Vogelsang
- May 22, 2005 1:43 AM
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