Look here!

Gmail, in case you haven't heard about it, is a new free email service being offered by Google. It's big appeal is that it plans to offer 100 times the storage space available at some of its rivals.

However, that comes with a price that has left a number of privacy advocates gaping.

In order to use the service, you have to allow Google to scan your emails for the purpose of sending you targeted advertisements based on what you write.

The targeted adverts would use key words after scanning your private e-mail - posting adverts for pharmaceutical products, for example, if a message mentions a medical condition.

Google's plans have already come under fire from privacy campaigners objecting to adverts linked to the content of messages, and to the permanent storage of email.

That latter concern is drawn from the fact that while Gmail does allow for large-scale storage of old emails, it also does not allow users to completely delete any of it even if they want to!

Google says the process is fully automated, so the content of users' email would remain private. Why don't I find that terribly reassuring? Maybe because Gmail's own privacy policy says

Google employees do not access the content of any mailboxes unless you specifically request them to do so (for example, if you are having technical difficulties accessing your account) or if required by law, to maintain our system, or to protect Google or the public,

(my emphasis) which seems to be a big enough loophole that even a first-year law student could drive a deliberate, intrusive through it.

The privacy statement also makes much of saying that no human reads the mail for the purpose of sending targeted ads, which is childishly obvious (Can you say "astonishingly inefficient?") and totally irrelevant, because it's not the issue. The issue is first that what it supposed to be at least nominally private is going to be examined for the purpose of selling us more crap and that it's establishing a technology and a precedent that can be used for further invasions of privacy either by abuse or logical extension.

Figure it this way: Suppose the government was a vendor of commercial services. Now, a postcard is not a private missive, in fact, it's much less private than email. When you send a postcard, you're accepting the fact that people other than the intended recipient might - will - see it. But suppose that you heard that the government was instituting a program to scan every postcard and permanently store the contents in order to sell you products, with the assurance that no one would look at those records unless the government thought it necessary to protect itself or the public. Would you feel the least little uncomfortable about that? If so, why should you feel differently about a corporation doing it?

The most depressing part of all this was reading the comments at the BBC link (above). Most of them just shrugged off the privacy issues as irrelevant or an annoyance. We are so screwed.