So Google chose an interesting day -- April Fool's Day -- to announce their new free email service, Gmail. But apparently, it's legit, or so the posters on Birdhouse say; NPR also carried the story this morning. So it's either a particularly brilliant cross-media prank, with the good folks of NPR and CNN and some other news bureaus in on the joke, or it's for real.
Assuming for the sake of argument that it's real, there's something extremely troubling about Gmail -- they are going to scan your email and deliver ads based on the content found therein. Here's what the Gmail FAQ says:
Gmail does include relevant text ads that are similar to the ads appearing on the right side of Google search results pages. The matching of ads to content is a completely automated process performed by computers using the same technology that powers the Google AdSense program.
By using the AdSense tech, they plan to "enhance" your experience. But the privacy implications are quite disturbing. Even though they claim that "no humans read your email", if the content can be scanned, it can be stored; if it can be stored, it can be analyzed; if it can be analyzed, it can be abused. Abused as in: read or distributed by a disgruntled employee; hacked by a malicious outsider; subpoenaed by law enforcement.
Furthermore, the content-scanning presumably works both ways. So, if I send you a bunch of pornographic emails on your Gmail account, wouldn't that tilt the ads you see toward a more risque direction? And are you as an outsider really comfortable sending mail to a Gmail user, knowing that it will be pattern-matched and databased? And what if your Gmail account receives only spam mail? Wouldn't the AdSense server choke on the sheer meta-ness of it all and disappear in a puff of self-referential advertising logic?
Altogether it's hard to see how this is a "user enhancement". A gigabyte of free storage isn't worth having your email read, even if it's just a machine doing the reading.
Perhaps the Google Mirror can shed some light on this:
http://www.alltooflat.com/geeky/elgoog/
Enter query sdrawkcab.
As the day wears on, the whole idea of GMail has gone from seeming preposterous to brilliant (from their perspective).
Posted by: Scot Hacker at April 1, 2004 10:59 PM