http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,62917,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2
More Orwellian nonsence from google with HUGE potentiol for Serious Abuse!
Google's plan to offer free Web-based e-mail has raised worries among privacy advocates that the service could make it easier for law enforcement to conduct surveillance of its users.
Google said Wednesday it plans to offer an e-mail service, called Gmail, that would give account owners 1 GB of free storage. Gmail would also offer search capabilities allowing users to find specific pieces of information buried within tens of thousands of e-mails. The size of the storage would blow away offerings from rivals like Yahoo and Microsoft's Hotmail.
But Google said it would use automated technology to scan the content of incoming e-mail for keywords and place related text ads inside the mail. For example, if someone sent an e-mail to a Gmail user suggesting they go out for Mexican food, the recipient might see a couple of text ads in the right column of the e-mail suggesting specific Mexican restaurants in their area.
Wayne Rosing, Google's vice president of engineering, said the system would not read and insert ads into correspondence that the Gmail user sent out.
"That would be editorializing your outgoing e-mail," he said.
Gmail would only insert ads into incoming mail -- presumably editorializing only incoming mail.
Google already targets ads on its search results pages. But Richard M. Smith, a privacy and security consultant, said scanning e-mail to seed it with ads is a bad idea.
"I think it's crossing a line that shouldn't be crossed. They should just transfer content. They should never be looking at content," Smith said.
"It's absurd that using a communications medium should subject one to privacy-invasive advertising," said Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Why not put an operator on the phone to listen to your conversation and pitch things to you while you're talking? You'd say that's ridiculous. Well, this is ridiculous. We have a norm to not allow commercial interests to interfere with our communications."
Free e-mail providers like Juno, Yahoo and Hotmail already insert text ads into the bottom of account holders' e-mail messages, but the ads are randomly generated and not related to content in the e-mails.
In addition to disregarding users' privacy, Smith said the practice of scanning mail to deliver ads would lead to scenarios where advertisers purchased specific keywords to place inappropriate or intrusive ads in a user's e-mail, such as ads that push a political agenda.
"Can I as a pro-life person, for example, target e-mail messages that seem to be about abortion? It's one of the creepiest things I've heard of," he said.
Google's Rosing said the specific pro-life scenario probably would not happen, since the company has a restriction against selling ads on certain sensitive terms. But he said it's possible that an ad for Democratic presidential contender John Kerry might appear in an e-mail that discusses politics, even if the user is a Bush supporter.
"One of the things we spend a lot of energy on is producing the highest quality ads that are not insensitive or inappropriate. But it's an algorithm," Rosing said. The program can't know that a user is a Bush supporter just because the e-mail mentions Bush, he said.
"We will try to target the advertising in an appropriate way," Rosing said. "But this is an evolving part of business.... We'll learn. I'm sure our users will tell us very frankly when we don't get it right and we'll adjust accordingly."
Rosing said Google will not keep a log of which ads went to which users, nor will it keep a record of keywords that appear often in an individual's e-mail.
But Hoofnagle said the practice may violate the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which prohibits ISPs or other organizations from monitoring the content of communication unless there is a specific reason for doing so -- such as for spam filtering or preventing the leaking of sensitive corporate information.
He said he is concerned that law enforcement eventually would want to single out users who say certain things in their e-mail. It's just too tempting.
"This is what Total Information Awareness is about, detecting subtle signals in the transaction space," Hoofnagle said, referring to a proposed Pentagon program that sought to centralize thousands of commercial and government databases to look for suspicious activity. Congress voted to cut money to the program a few months ago, and the government says it no longer is pursuing it.
Google said it believes it is complying with the law.
"If you have computers that can do scanning, they can be used for surveillance, but we have constitutional protections against this," Google's Rosing said. "User privacy is a very important thing to our company. Our legal staff has carefully looked over this system and they are very satisfied with it."
Google spokesman Nate Tyler also pointed out that under U.S. law, companies cannot be required to conduct surveillance of users across the board. But if law enforcement came to Google with a subpoena to gather information about a suspected criminal, the company would supply whatever information was required by law.
"If the government wants to monitor e-mail, they can do that by monitoring the backbone of the Internet," he added. "They don't need Google to do that."
Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy & Technology said the only problem he sees is the long-term storage of e-mail. Google said users will be able to store their mail on its servers for as long as they want. But Schwartz said the law has a lower threshold for allowing law enforcement to obtain e-mails that have been stored for more than 180 days. Police and feds have to jump through more legal hoops to get their hands on fresh e-mail or e-mail in transit.
"That's the one privacy issue with this," Schwartz said. "But that exists with any ISP. Google, however, can store the messages for longer (because of the huge storage capacity offered Gmail users). You do lose protection over mail after a certain point of time if you keep it on a third-party server."
Google founder Larry Page said the issue is not the capability of the technology, but what the law requires.
"I see that there's a potential issue here," Page said. "We expect to be very responsive to any issues that come up with this. We expect to do the maximum that we can to protect our users' privacy. It would be very surprising if any aspect of the advertising has an effect on users' privacy and we would work very hard to make sure that wasn't the case."
More Orwellian nonsence from google with HUGE potentiol for Serious Abuse!
