I didn’t post on Google’s “free” 1GB e-mail service yesterday, because I didn’t want to get April fooled. Now details are starting to emerge, and–surprise, surprise–Google plans to search through the e-mails to power its corresponding advertising:
Privacy advocates are concerned that there’s one big flaw with Google Inc.’s free e-mail service: The company plans to read the messages.
The Internet search firm insists that it needs to know what’s in the e-mails that pass through its system — so that they can be sprinkled with advertisements Google thinks are relevant. After all, revenue from those targeted ads will pay for the Gmail service, which began a limited test Thursday, offering up to 500 times as much e-mail storage as competing Web e-mail programs from Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
The electronic letters won’t be read by Google employees; computers will handle that chore. Nonetheless, the specter of seeing an ad for an antacid beside a message from a friend complaining about stomach pain is enough to make some people nervous about the e-mail service.
Spam-filtering programs, of course, already do this; so the practice isn’t new for a lot of e-mail users. Still, if Google gets too cute with its data collection, the potential is there for it to breach privacy expectations.
UPDATE: Wired News has more, including this interesting legal detail: law enforcement has a lower threshold to meet in requiring the disclosure of private e-mail after it’s been stored on servers 180 days than it does to obtain more recent e-mail.
I’m still skeptical about the 1GB storage. How many RAIDs are they going to run to accommodate that? This is 500 times more storage than Hotmail. Think about that. How does Google make money serving that kind of space at no cost to the user?
Supposedly by selling ads.
One good point that a number of people have made is that the vast majority of users will use far less storage than the 1GB limit.
Greetings,
While I think it is only a gimmick, the only reason I can figure is that it would make it easier to email large files, video clips, mpgs etc.
But otherwise, I archive all my old email on my own hard drive. I also prefer using university email services instead of other free services, then I don’t have to worry about any of the ads or spam or other nonsense. Some Universities offer email for free to anyone, even a nonstudent.