mediajunk

I have never before seen an announcement by an internet company cause such a stir. Google's recent promise to bring Gmail -- a free email service offering massive storage space and other enticing features -- has caused a huge storm about privacy concerns. Already, 28 privacy and civil liberty organisations in the US have joined together to call for Google to suspend its Gmail plans. "The 28 organizations are voicing their concerns about Google’s plan to scan the text of all incoming messages for the purposes of ad placement, noting that the scanning of confidential email for inserting third party ad content violates the implicit trust of an email service provider. The scanning creates lower expectations of privacy in the email medium and may establish dangerous precedents. Other concerns include the unlimited period for data retention that Google’s current policies allow, and the potential for unintended secondary uses of the information Gmail will collect and store." Meanwhile, Google points to its privacy policy, which states: "We serve highly relevant ads and other information as part of the service using our unique content-targeting technology. No human reads your email to target ads or related information to you without your consent." But Google will store all of your emails into the future -- even after you close your Gmail account, should you do so. And though you might find Google trustworthy right now, can you extend that trust indefinitely into the future? While it would be extremely impractical for Google employees to read the contents of individual emails (since its databases be such a huge number of individual messages, the majority of which would contain little of interest to a third party), your messages would certainly be searchable -- especially by Google. One misplaced trigger word and your message might raise a flag down at the Googleplex. On the other hand, is there any such thing as private email? Unless both parties of an email exchange are using public key encryption, is pretty easy for any number of third parties intercepting your message. The bottom line is that email is *not* private. It never was. And it probably never will be.