I am suuuuuch a geek that I am posting here to say that I am very excited as I just got a gmail invite.

Wow, I really need to get a life....

jr

loser. I got one last month.

Hehe. Man, why you gotta rain on my parade! :-P

jr

How is the spam so far?

zero spam so far, unless you count the e-mails I get from Ken.

hey if anyone wants to invite me i'd be happy my email is LouisLo16@hotmail.com

heheh please?

I have a gmail account too...no invites though, sorry.

I haven't been paying attention... the main benifit is jsut that gig of space, right?...

Well, that is a benefit. But right now it is (for me anyway) a combination of it being from google (I'm a whore for google) and braging rights. I got one before everyone else could sign up.
Both really geeky of me! Hence my admitting it right off the bat.

jr

You are actually happy to have been offered a gmail account? I wouldn't go near it. I don't care how much space they give, I don't want them reading my mail. I'm also refusing to exchange mail with anyone using it, since they can read that too. They are using it all for tracking and targeted ads. I normally like google, but that is too much.

First, "they" who read your email is a computer program. And yes, it automatically inserts ads to the right of the email occasionally. You hardly notice them. As for privacy concerns, you know that email sent on any email system is just as vulnerable to prying eyes as gmail? If a *person* wants to read your email and has the authority or know how to do it, they will. If the feds want your email, they will get it, hell if they want your text messages they can apparently get those too. If a computer program scans my email so that it can do targetted advertising, I am perfectly fine with that. There is no human who can read your emails on gmail and not read them on another server. Even when you've "deleted" your emails, they are often still there for months or years, accessible if needed.

Do you use google? You know they target ads based on everything you search right? It's no different, except that instead of your search queries they also advertise based on email content.

I wouldn't reccommend going into your public library and checking out 100 books consisting of books on chemistry, religion, atlas', psychology, terrorism, and law enforcement tactics. That's going to set off some flags. That's a privacy situation I would worry about. That is people directly reviewing your reading habits and deciding if you are a concern or not. This is a whole other beast.

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hey if anyone wants to invite me i'd be happy my email is LouisLo16@hotmail.com

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Sure, I've got more invites than I know what to do with. Anyone else? First come, first serve.

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I haven't been paying attention... the main benifit is jsut that gig of space, right?...

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That's just part of it. The main benefit is the storage combined with the ability to do a google search on your stored messages.

After Google announced gmail, everyone was going crazy about the gigabyte of storage. So a bunch of other e-mail services upped their storage to compete. But it's not really very enticing competition without the addition of the google search feature, because the whole point of having a gig of storage and not ever having to delete a message is so you can just search through all of your old messages when you're looking for something someone sent you. It's really amazingly convenient.

Oh, and the web interface is far an away the best webmail interface I've ever encountered.

I agree. It's amazingly quick. I click and bang!! there is everything I want and it is very clean. I think they hired some very smart or well experienced (probably both) to come up with the layout and interface.

jr

That sounds like the arguement...wireless is insecure, so why use WEP at all. I'm still going to do what I can to make it easier for people to read my email, break into my computer, etc.

As far as only the computer program looking at your mail, I think that is just the first step down a road to less email privacy that I don't want to take. Maybe someday, but not now.

I'm a geek too BTW, and I dig Google over other search engines, I just hadn't investigated gmail myself other than headlines I see on /. etc

I don't think I'm saying anything like "wireless is insecure so why use WEP." You certainly shouldn't *rely* on WEP if you need truly secure wireless, but it's not going to do any harm to use it. We're not talking about encryption here, if you want secure communications use RSA and get yourself a 500 decimal digit private key. Then nobody will read your email. We're talking about the equivalent of sending a package through the USPS vs. Fed Ex.

What I'm saying is, the loss of privacy between gmail and yahoo mail is imaginary. It was drummed up by competitive companies so that people would be scared and not move to gmail. There are not people reading my email. There is a computer program that scans it for key content, and then uses that content to load advertisements. Google can't afford to hire people to sift through 1 gig of email per user, that's a hell of a lot of text. Now if down the road they decide to hire an army to scan emails by human, then I will stop using them.

I'm not saying you should use gmail. (Although it does have a much slicker interface than any web based email I've ever used.) I'm saying your security concern reasons for distrusting it are not valid. If you read the policies, there is really no difference at all except that a machine scans your email and provides targetted ads. Machines scan your email *all the time* with every spam-filter providing web service.

This is GMail's privacy page
I would suggest reading the paragraph titled "Email content and usage" under "What types of personal information to we collect and how do we use it?"

This is essentially the same privacy policy that companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon have.

hey josh thanks for the invite, i'm finally part of the club

At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, it's pretty much a known fact that the U.S. Government scans all Internet traffic for keywords related to drugs, terrorism, and George Bush being out of control, among other things.

Basically, there is no such thing as e-mail privacy without encryption. So, gmail shouldn't scare you.

That's pretty much the way I see it Josh. If I want security I'll walk it to a friend or use PGP.
Of course I have nothing other than personal info (financial stuff and social) that I would fear being leaked out. Maybe some bad poetry from my angst ridden teen years?

jr

Maybe you're all right about this, but every time something like this comes up it just seems like we keep inching another step closer towards not having privacy.

Is it really ok that all that other email is scanned for things already? No, but we accept it, and therefore accept the next step of the computer scanning it and targeting ads, which will likely eventually lead to the next step of people being able to read it being written into the privacy terms. By then everyone will just say, well...the computer can already scan it, and people out on the Internet can grab it and read it, so what's the difference. It just seems like another small step down a road we have already gone too far down. I don't really like the targeted ad part either....I already get enough junk. I guess the logic for the step down the path of that road is, well, I already get junk mail, it might as well be targeted so it might actually be of interest.

I guess the difference to me is that stuff out there now can be read by those with the time and know how, but that doesn't mean I think it is ok...with Gmail, you are giving your approval by signing up that this is ok. (albeit only by a computer)

It's starting to look like I'm alone on this one though, so either I'm too worried about this stuff, it's not really a big deal, or everyone else has just given up already.

I agree with you that if a clause is written in whereby people can read it, that is an invasion of privacy. And I agree with you about things always inching further and further along into our privacy. I just don't think that in this particular case it's as significant as it has been made out to be. And also, the targetted ads are not in the form of junk email, they show up to the right of the email text, exactly like the targeted ads show up when you search on google. You barely notice them unless you want to read them.

I'll admit, when I first got an invite I did some homework on this because I was pretty concerned from all I'd heard too. That's the only reason I'm not so worried about it anymore.

Then again I use my supermarket/CVS discount cards without a care, even though I know they use them to track my purchases and give me targeted coupons at the checkout. So, maybe I am just generally less concerned about these things than some people.

hey Zarack that's quite a slippery slope your cruising down

A lot of it is just fear and paranoia. "Oh no my computer is going to be broken into!" That's why some shy away from webmail or wireless, but really, I can break into your house with a hammer and look in your filing cabinet when you're not home, yet you seem perfectly safe putting all your stuff there.

There's always risks involved, and the best defense isn't software, it isn't hardware, it's that brain up in your head. Common sense is one of the greatest gifts you have. My family, friends, people I lecture too, etc, are always asking my "why don't you have tons of spyware and viruses on your computer?"... Well yes I use anti-virus software, but I don't use internet security, or crank up all my Internet Explorer settings to restricted or high... it's common sense, with a bit of email filtering and saying NO to random dialog boxes, you can feel better about yourself.

I use wireless internet with my tabletpc, and have it encrypted, and I change the password now and then... but what it all boils down to is your fear and paranoia. I'm not afraid of the internet or its users, I'm happy and comfortable surfing the web, and that only can make it a very positive experience. If you've got young kids in the house, surf the net with them, show them the cool stuff indeed of them having to go find it themselves and accidentally clicking on something they shouldn't.

It's never the computers fault, it only does what the user tells it to.

My .02.

- D

P.S. As for Gmail, I have a gmail account , do I use it? Not really as I have POP/SMTP secure accounts on three servers, and I <3 Outlook 2003

Daphoid,

Excellent post...and I concur 100%.

I manage IT for a small company, and we recently had a virus/worm scare, first one in my five years with the company.

After I sent out a scathing email to the whole company about the use of "private" computers on the companies network and how it will no longer be tolerated with out my consent, I found out how many people do not use virus protection at home.

I can understand a bit on why people do not update their Microsoft OSes with the provided patches, but no virus protection....I think that is negligence.

At home, I use Norton/Symantec antivirus and Spybot. Spybot, being free, is a no brainer and works well.