Read My Mail, Please / The silly privacy fears about Google's e-mail service

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

[ I would like to try it BUT  NO ONE offered :-)  djf]

To: undisclosed-recipient:;
From: Monty Solomon <monty () roscom com>
Subject: Read My Mail, Please / The silly privacy fears about Google's
 e-mail service


Read My Mail, Please
The silly privacy fears about Google's e-mail service.

By Paul Boutin
Updated  Thursday, April 15, 2004, at 2:26 PM PT

Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were the heroes of the
Net from the moment they launched their better-than-the-rest search
engine in 1998, right up until two weeks ago. On April 1, they
announced plans for Gmail , a Googleized alternative to the free
Web-based e-mail services offered by Hotmail, Yahoo!, and a slew of
smaller companies. Depending on your take, Gmail is either too good
to be true, or it's the height of corporate arrogance, especially
coming from a company whose house motto is "Don't Be Evil."

At first, Web hipsters dismissed Gmail as an April Fool's hoax. But
Google's offer is real. Gmail will provide each user an entire
gigabyte of free e-mail storage. That's about 250 times the
4-megabyte limit of a basic Yahoo! Mail account and 10 times
Hotmail's 100-megabyte "super-user" package, which costs $60 a year.
In return for all that inbox space, Google wants just one favor: to
be allowed to scan the content of your incoming messages and serve
content-targeted ads alongside them.

If you haven't tried it, it sounds creepy. But after a week of
testing the prerelease version of Gmail, I'm on the other side of the
fence. Gmail isn't an invasion of privacy, and its ads are preferable
to the giant blinking banners for diets and dating services that are
splashed across my other Web mail accounts.

...

http://slate.msn.com/id/2098946/

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