EPIC supporter says group has "crossed line" in anti-Gmail campaign [priv]

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: FW: Opposition to your stance on Gmail [REMOVEEMAIL]
Date: Tue, 4 May 2004 16:55:17 -0700
From: Ilya Haykinson
To: 'Declan McCullagh' <declan () well com>

Declan,



FYI - this is what I sent to EPIC.



  _____

From: Ilya Haykinson
Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 3:57 PM
To: 'info () epic org'; 'rotenberg () epic org'
Subject: Opposition to your stance on Gmail



Hello,



As a long-time supporter of privacy initiatives on the Internet, and a
supporter of many organizations that speak out for privacy and freedom in
the information age (I have supported the EFF and ACM for several years), I
have always wanted to give my support to your organization for its
outstanding work.



However, with your recent stance on Gmail (and especially the letters to the
CA state attorney general), I feel that you have crossed the line between
privacy and anti-commercialism. In my opinion, the Gmail service is not any
different than any other web mail service, with the exception that it is
better and easier to use. The scanning of mail by computers is done by every
anti-spam program. The retention of deleted mail in backups is done by every
company offering email services. Advertising support of free email services
is a feature of every commercial email service.



I believe that the question about Gmail is _not_ a question for government
regulation, or even industry uproar. It is a question for individuals -
whether to use the service or not. The privacy policy and all the related
information on that site clearly states exactly what Google is planning to
do with the emails you get.



I think that your organization has become misguided in its quest to preserve
privacy on the Internet. Instead of Google, your organization should be
lobbying the attorney general to do something about spyware that is often
advertising in misleading ways, contains marginally-truthful privacy policy
if it even has one at all, and is completely impossible to remove from a
computer system. Your organization needs to lobby governments of countries
that proxy data, scanning for offensive keywords and then persecuting people
exercising their freedom of speech. Your organization needs to pursue
"opt-out" spammers with no return addresses.



By pursuing Google, you are implicitly not pursuing these true privacy
violations as much as you could have. And for that, you would not be able to
gain my or any of my acquaintances' support.



Sincerely,



-ilya haykinson


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