On Mon, 2004-09-13 at 21:19 -0500, Ryan Schlosser wrote: > On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 17:20:21 -0700, Cliff Wells > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Mon, 2004-09-13 at 17:36 -0500, Ryan Schlosser wrote: > > > > > I personally suggest anyone who hasn't tried gmail - you should at > > > least take the invite, and take it for a test drive. > > > > After Orkut, I think I'll be skipping future Google offerings (aside > > from search engines) for a while. I wouldn't want my email put in > > 'jail' because I didn't sign up with my real name <0.5 wink>. > > > > Eish, that's such not a fair comparison... but I can DEFINITELY see > how that opinion could taint your desire to try something else > Google...
Yeah, I was being a bit facetious, but truth be told, I'm a bit wary of Google's sudden commercial turn. They've got the resources (information) to become a serious threat to personal privacy (McCarthy would have killed for the type of data-mining Orkut gets people to volunteer for: "Are you or have you ever been... oh never mind, I'll just check Orkut"). They've got your networks of friends and now they've got your correspondence with those friends. No doubt benign (just another company trying to turn a profit), but the *potential* for abuse is simply too huge too ignore. While I doubt the *current* regime at Google is really interested in abusing that information, all it takes is a subpoena or a merger (or even a hacker - I wonder how much corporate spies would like to get their hands on Google's data) to change everything. Given the nature of Google, I suspect that email archives will live for quite some time after deletion by gmail users (days, months, years? Their privacy policy doesn't really say) and in fact might possibly outlive the current state of affairs. I'm not comfortable with that. I guess to sum it up, I'm concerned that Google's information resources could easily be turned from indexing the web to indexing individuals. Their termination of accounts on Orkut of individuals who preferred to remain anonymous certainly doesn't allay my concerns much. Regards, Cliff -- Cliff Wells <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ PDXLUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://pdxlug.org/mailman/listinfo/pdxlug
