I have been wanting to write about this on my blog for a long time.. But I guess I had better thoughts to engrave..
I am sure that most of us use GMail. By far they provide the largest Inbox Size...But everytime we use Gmail, we are allowing Google to read our messages. What they do is mine messages from our Inbox and display appropriate adds on the right hand side...I am sure that most of us would have noticed this but wouldn't have bothered... I sure din't bother.
They are not posting these adds based on the Subject Line alone... I sent a mail with irrelevant subject and body. But I got adds only based on the body of the mail. This definetly means that they are prying on our privacy. They are doing this because we are allowing them to do it as long as we get what we want... Larger Inboxes!!
5 comments:
Hey Swetha,
I guess you haven't read the privacy policy of gmail or any other webmail before signing up. If you look for their Privacy Policy, all of them disclose that they use your personal data. For example from Gmail about Personal Data "Gmail stores, processes and maintains your messages, contact lists and other data related to your account in order to provide the service to you."
You are right. They do process your information to provide better services. They use the body of the email to provide related ads (adsense), links to maps.google if your body has an address information, etc., The only difference with google and others is that they are very very good in content processing and sense making out of a large chunk of information. Hence, you can notice that they can use your information effectively (some of the services are good). Now you will understand, why google is hosting this blogspot and plethora of services like google desktop, google earth, etc.,. ;-)
On a sidenote, please note that anything that you send over the network in "clear text" can potentially be read by any intermediate nodes i.e. mail relays, routers, etc., have access to your information.
If you really want to send a secure email, you should consider sending / receiving encrypted emails. Public / private key pair based encryption schemes are commonly used and supported by many mail clients (like Mozilla, Outlook etc.,). All you need to do is to create a public-private key pair and publish your public key in a webpage. Anyone can encrypt a message using your public key. Only you (who has the private key) will be able to decrypt the message encrypted with your public key. You can find more details here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography
Ricky:
actually google's idea of adsense is based on scanning the body of the mail. They do read through the mail but I doubt if they store them.
Venkatesh:
I have never had patience to read the privacy policies... just click on "I agree" ;) Encryption is a good idea but I think it would a little tedious for a large group coz we need to encrypt the messages individually for each person using their public key.. No more "reply all".. Although we can develop a script to do the encrytion using appropriate public keys when replying to more than one...
thats smart of you of send dummy emails to see how the ad thingy works :)
i totally agree! they are encroaching on our privacy and no one seems to be worrying about it! google is no different from microsoft!!
the darker side of gmail!
@Swetha,
You don't have to manually encrypt. Mail clients are smart and they can encrypt automically with respective public keys (email is linked with a public key and you can tell always encrypt to this email address).
@Sheks, @Sidharth:
All free web-based email services "encroach" on your privacy. Not just google.
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