On Thu, 08 Jul 2004 07:18:11 -0700, Philip Aker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thursday, Jul 8, 2004, at 01:49 America/Vancouver, Dennis W. Manasco > wrote: > > > Isn't anyone else concerned about the privacy violation implicit in > > letting google's robots paw through a gigabyte of their mail, > > everything from list subscriptions to personal mail to order receipts, > > in order to 'categorize the user' for google's advertisers?
It doesn't "categorize the user." It's on a message-by-message basis, and ads only pertain to what is currently on the screen... not some conspiratorial "user profile" they're making behind your back. > > But google's whole philosophy seems to be that this huge aggregation > > of personal (and often private) information should serve as a > > data-mine for their advertisers. I don't know what google's current > > privacy statement says, but we know that web agreements can change > > daily. Well, I don't take such a paranoid view of it. I think you're making a bigger deal out of it than is truly warranted. > > The idea of some advertiser-driven company analyzing all of that > > information about my interests and contacts makes me feel absolutely > > creepy. Again, they don't analyze it in bulk. They just target ads to the message currently shown on the screen, like the Google Ads that you see all over the Web. > Suckers born every minute. I resent the implication, Philip. I consider myself an informed computer user (heck, I was a Support Technician for Information Technology Services in college!), and I'm not worried about what Google might do. I'm not one of those pack-rats who keeps every single email ever sent to me; especially list mail (that's what the archive at shsu.edu is for). Google does, contrary to early reports, have an easy-to-use message deletion feature, and in interviews I've read they've stated that those messages actually get deleted and not saved on a gmail server somewhere. > Just for laughs, send some posts to a gmail > account with Arabic translation of "suitcase nuke delivery to Fort > Meade confirmed for Sep 11" with a 50 Meg blowfish encrypted attachment > of garbage bytes. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't find that particularly funny. -- Brad Beyenhof [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://augmentedfourth.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
