{"id":830,"date":"2004-04-02T10:45:26","date_gmt":"2004-04-02T15:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wordpress\/2004\/04\/gmail\/"},"modified":"2004-04-02T10:45:26","modified_gmt":"2004-04-02T15:45:26","slug":"gmail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/2004\/04\/gmail\/","title":{"rendered":"G-Mail"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.
\nThe 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.
\nThe 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.
\nUPDATE: Wired News has more<\/a>, including this interesting legal detail: law enforcement has a lower threshold<\/a> to meet in requiring the disclosure of private e-mail after<\/i> it’s been stored on servers 180 days than it does to obtain more recent e-mail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-830","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"h-entry","8":"hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}