Interesting article....it's long, but informative.

[geekerati]

These are not my words, please enjoy.

There has been a rash of recent editorials about privacy concerns with Google's gmail service. A number of organizations have asked Google to voluntarily suspend the service. One California legislator has gone so far as to say she plans to introduce a bill to ban it. This is nuts! A number of things to consider:

1. There are already hundreds of millions of users of hosted mail services at AOL, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo! These services routinely scan all mail for viruses and spam. Despite the claims of critics, I don't see that the kind of automated text scanning that Google would need to do to insert context-sensitive ads is all that different from the kind of automated text scanning that is used to detect spam. (And in fact, those oppressed by spam should look forward to having Google's brilliant search experts tackle spam detection as part of their problem set!) Google doesn't have humans reading this mail; it has programs reading them. Yes, Google could instruct a program to mine the stored email for confidential information. But so could Yahoo! or AOL or MSN today. (Perhaps people feel Google is to be feared because they seem to so good at what they do. But that seems rather an odd point of view.)

2. For that matter, the very act of sending an email message consists of having a number of programs on different machines read and store your mail. Every time you send an email message, it is typically routed through a number of computers to get to its destination. Run the traceroute command at a command prompt on any Linux or UNIX system (including Mac OS X) or tracert on a Windows system to see the hops that your internet packets go through from your machine to any destination site. Anyone equipped with a packet sniffer at any of those sites can snoop any mail that they want. In fact, the NSA recently proved the effectiveness of this approach by tracking down terrorists by way of their mail traffic.

3. The amount of personal data already collected by credit agencies and direct marketers dwarfs what might be gleaned from email. There are folks right now, who know everything you've ever bought. Heck, just recently, I was shopping in Bath, England, and made a large purchase in an antiquarian bookshop. Fifteen minutes later, I was four buildings down the street in a second bookshop, tried to make another purchase, and had my card rejected. Meanwhile, back in California, my wife was receiving a call, wondering if the card had been stolen. "Why would someone halfway around the world be spending so much on books?" they wanted to know. That's real time monitoring! Privacy advocates (and as a former board member of the EFF I count myself among them) argue that privacy is a slippery slope. But we're already a long way down that slope, and I have a lot more trust in Google to do the right thing to protect my privacy than I have in credit card and direct marketing companies! I certainly don't see why Google is being singled out. There are so many bigger issues to worry about, from RFID tagging to surveillance cameras on London street corners, that programmed scanning of email for targeted ad insertion doesn't seem like too big a deal to me, especially when it's disclosed up front to participants in the service.

4. Gmail's offer of extended storage means that hosted email accounts might appeal to more than the casual home user, resulting in the storage of more mission-critical messages, but considering that many businesses are already hosting critical business data at outside service providers like salesforce.com, I hardly think that is a show stopper.

People are also expressing concerns about Google's plan to insert targeted advertising into email sent with the service. Once again, I find myself baffled by the uproar. Some reasons:

1. No one is going to be forced to use gmail. If you don't like ads in your mail, don't use the service. Let the market decide. (Note: as far as I can tell, ads do not appear in outgoing mail, so there's no spamming of non-subscribers. Ads appear only in the mailbox of the gmail user. And as with Google adwords on search results, the ads appear in text boxes off to the side of the message, where they can easily be ignored if the information they provide is not useful.)

2. Google has a history of providing tasteful, unobtrusive, useful advertising. When all the other online services rushed to plaster their sites with bigger and more obnoxious banner ads, skyscrapers, popups, pop-unders, and screaming animations, Google held the line, and defined a new paradigm for advertising that no one seems to mind.

Meanwhile, I am entranced with the benefits that gmail will hopefully provide!

1. The ability to search through my email with the effectiveness that has made Google the benchmark for search. How many times have people asked, "When can I have Google to search my hard disk?" That's a hard problem, as long as it's just your disk, on your isolated machine. But it's solvable once Google has lots and lots of structured data to work with, and can build algorithms to determine patterns in that data. Gmail is Google's brilliant solution to that problem: don't search the desktop, move the desktop application to a larger, searchable space where the metadata can be collected and made explicit, as it is on the web.

2. The second-order search through "six degrees of separation" promised (but not yet delivered) by all of the social networking services such as Friendster, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and Google's own Orkut. These services are essentially a hack, designed to get around the fact that no one has yet re-invented the address book for the era of the internet. Why should I have to spam all my friends, asking them to "join my network", if my email client is smart enough to know who I know, how often I communicate with them, as well as who they know, and how well.

(Microsoft Research's Wallop project shows some interesting steps in this direction. Until I saw gmail, I was convinced that Microsoft would eventually own the social networking space by adding Wallop features to Outlook, since having access to the actual email traffic data and address book is so much more powerful than the workarounds that the social network services have to endure. I've been excited about the Chandler project because I saw its developers asking themselves how to reinvent the address book for the age of the internet -- thinking of contacts as private, public, or somewhere in between. But Chandler seemed like too little, too late to keep Microsoft from owning another promising new application category.)

Eventually, I imagine I'll be able to ask gmail, who do I know who can help me to reach someone I'm looking to meet...and get a reasonable answer, without any invasion of privacy. After all, I have lots of friends who know me well enough to make a recommendation to their friends, and pass on contact info if appropriate. Gmail wouldn't break any new social ground here -- it would just make it easier to find out who to ask, without revealing any confidential information. (Meanwhile, the existing social network services DO lead people to reveal lots of private information that could be misused by spammers and other electronic harvesters. Gmail could provide this information more securely.)

3. Storage of my critical data on one of the largest, most reliable data storage banks in the world. As Rich Skrenta made so clear in his recent weblog posting, Google is the shape of the future. Forget Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law. Storage is getting cheaper faster than any other part of the technology infrastructure. I remember Bob Morris, head of IBM's Storage Division and the Almaden Research Labs, telling me a couple of years ago, that before too long, storage would be cheap enough and small enough that someone who wanted to do so could film every moment of his life, and carry the record around in a pocket. Scary? Maybe. But the future is always scary to those who cling to the past. It is enormously exciting if you focus on the possibilities. Just think how much value Google and other online information providers have already brought to all of our lives -- the ability to find facts, in moments, from a library larger than any of us could have imagined a decade ago.

Gmail is fascinating to me as a watershed event in the evolution of the internet. In a brilliant Copernican stroke, gmail turns everything on its head, rejecting the personal computer as the center of the computing universe, instead recognizing that applications revolve around the network as the planets revolve around the Sun. But Google and gmail go even further, showing that once internet apps truly get to scale, they'll make the network itself disappear into the universal virtual computer, the internet as operating system.

Written by: Tim O'Reilly

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[Randy]

Thanks. I put it in a quote code. Do not post something you didn't write without sourcing it and placing it inside quote code. Thanks.