[wordup] The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It's Bogus

[Adam Shand]

More on the Google conspiracy, you'll have to excuse my fascination :-) 
  It's not Google I'm obsessed with, it's watching people's reactions to 
it change.  It wasn't that long ago when Google could do no wrong ...

From: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4707

The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It's Bogus
Tim O'Reilly
Apr. 16, 2004 10:05 AM

  There has been a rash of recent editorials about privacy concerns with 
Google's gmail service. A number of organizations have asked Google to 
voluntarily suspend the service. One California legislator has gone so 
far as to say she plans to introduce a bill to ban it. This is nuts! A 
number of things to consider:

	1.  	 There are already hundreds of millions of users of hosted mail 
services at AOL, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo! These services routinely scan 
all mail for viruses and spam. Despite the claims of critics, I don't 
see that the kind of automated text scanning that Google would need to 
do to insert context-sensitive ads is all that different from the kind 
of automated text scanning that is used to detect spam. (And in fact, 
those oppressed by spam should look forward to having Google's 
brilliant search experts tackle spam detection as part of their problem 
set!) Google doesn't have humans reading this mail; it has programs 
reading them. Yes, Google could instruct a program to mine the stored 
email for confidential information. But so could Yahoo! or AOL or MSN 
today. (Perhaps people feel Google is to be feared because they seem to 
so good at what they do. But that seems rather an odd point of view.)

	2.  	 For that matter, the very act of sending an email message 
consists of having a number of programs on different machines read and 
store your mail. Every time you send an email message, it is typically 
routed through a number of computers to get to its destination. Run the 
traceroute command at a command prompt on any Linux or UNIX system 
(including Mac OS X) or tracert on a Windows system to see the hops 
that your internet packets go through from your machine to any 
destination site. Anyone equipped with a packet sniffer at any of those 
sites can snoop any mail that they want. In fact, the NSA recently 
proved the effectiveness of this approach by tracking down terrorists 
by way of their mail traffic.

	3.  	 The amount of personal data already collected by credit agencies 
and direct marketers dwarfs what might be gleaned from email. There are 
folks right now, who know everything you've ever bought. Heck, just 
recently, I was shopping in Bath, England, and made a large purchase in 
an antiquarian bookshop. Fifteen minutes later, I was four buildings 
down the street in a second bookshop, tried to make another purchase, 
and had my card rejected. Meanwhile, back in California, my wife was 
receiving a call, wondering if the card had been stolen. "Why would 
someone halfway around the world be spending so much on books?" they 
wanted to know. That's real time monitoring! Privacy advocates (and as 
a former board member of the EFF I count myself among them) argue that 
privacy is a slippery slope. But we're already a long way down that 
slope, and I have a lot more trust in Google to do the right thing to 
protect my privacy than I have in credit card and direct marketing 
companies! I certainly don't see why Google is being singled out. There 
are so many bigger issues to worry about, from RFID tagging to 
surveillance cameras on London street corners, that programmed scanning 
of email for targeted ad insertion doesn't seem like too big a deal to 
me, especially when it's disclosed up front to participants in the 
service.

	4.  	 Gmail's offer of extended storage means that hosted email 
accounts might appeal to more than the casual home user, resulting in 
the storage of more mission-critical messages, but considering that 
many businesses are already hosting critical business data at outside 
service providers like salesforce.com, I hardly think that is a show 
stopper.

  People are also expressing concerns about Google's plan to insert 
targeted advertising into email sent with the service. Once again, I 
find myself baffled by the uproar. Some reasons:

	1.  	 No one is going to be forced to use gmail. If you don't like ads 
in your mail, don't use the service. Let the market decide. (Note: as 
far as I can tell, ads do not appear in outgoing mail, so there's no 
spamming of non-subscribers. Ads appear only in the mailbox of the 
gmail user. And as with Google adwords on search results, the ads 
appear in text boxes off to the side of the message, where they can 
easily be ignored if the information they provide is not useful.)

	2.  	 Google has a history of providing tasteful, unobtrusive, useful 
advertising. When all the other online services rushed to plaster their 
sites with bigger and more obnoxious banner ads, skyscrapers, popups, 
pop-unders, and screaming animations, Google held the line, and defined 
a new paradigm for advertising that no one seems to mind.

  Meanwhile, I am entranced with the benefits that gmail will hopefully 
provide!

	1.  	 The ability to search through my email with the effectiveness 
that has made Google the benchmark for search. How many times have 
people asked, "When can I have Google to search my hard disk?" That's a 
hard problem, as long as it's just your disk, on your isolated machine. 
But it's solvable once Google has lots and lots of structured data to 
work with, and can build algorithms to determine patterns in that data. 
Gmail is Google's brilliant solution to that problem: don't search the 
desktop, move the desktop application to a larger, searchable space 
where the metadata can be collected and made explicit, as it is on the 
web.

	2.  	 The second-order search through "six degrees of separation" 
promised (but not yet delivered) by all of the social networking 
services such as Friendster, LinkedIn, Plaxo, and Google's own Orkut. 
These services are essentially a hack, designed to get around the fact 
that no one has yet re-invented the address book for the era of the 
internet. Why should I have to spam all my friends, asking them to 
"join my network", if my email client is smart enough to know who I 
know, how often I communicate with them, as well as who they know, and 
how well.

  (Microsoft Research's Wallop project shows some interesting steps in 
this direction. Until I saw gmail, I was convinced that Microsoft would 
eventually own the social networking space by adding Wallop features to 
Outlook, since having access to the actual email traffic data and 
address book is so much more powerful than the workarounds that the 
social network services have to endure. I've been excited about the 
Chandler project because I saw its developers asking themselves how to 
reinvent the address book for the age of the internet -- thinking of 
contacts as private, public, or somewhere in between. But Chandler 
seemed like too little, too late to keep Microsoft from owning another 
promising new application category.)

  Eventually, I imagine I'll be able to ask gmail, who do I know who can 
help me to reach someone I'm looking to meet...and get a reasonable 
answer, without any invasion of privacy. After all, I have lots of 
friends who know me well enough to make a recommendation to their 
friends, and pass on contact info if appropriate. Gmail wouldn't break 
any new social ground here -- it would just make it easier to find out 
who to ask, without revealing any confidential information. (Meanwhile, 
the existing social network services DO lead people to reveal lots of 
private information that could be misused by spammers and other 
electronic harvesters. Gmail could provide this information more 
securely.)

	3.  	 Storage of my critical data on one of the largest, most reliable 
data storage banks in the world. As Rich Skrenta made so clear in his 
recent weblog posting, Google is the shape of the future. Forget 
Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law. Storage is getting cheaper faster than 
any other part of the technology infrastructure. I remember Bob Morris, 
head of IBM's Storage Division and the Almaden Research Labs, telling 
me a couple of years ago, that before too long, storage would be cheap 
enough and small enough that someone who wanted to do so could film 
every moment of his life, and carry the record around in a pocket. 
Scary? Maybe. But the future is always scary to those who cling to the 
past. It is enormously exciting if you focus on the possibilities. Just 
think how much value Google and other online information providers have 
already brought to all of our lives -- the ability to find facts, in 
moments, from a library larger than any of us could have imagined a 
decade ago.

  Gmail is fascinating to me as a watershed event in the evolution of 
the internet. In a brilliant Copernican stroke, gmail turns everything 
on its head, rejecting the personal computer as the center of the 
computing universe, instead recognizing that applications revolve 
around the network as the planets revolve around the Sun. But Google 
and gmail go even further, showing that once internet apps truly get to 
scale, they'll make the network itself disappear into the universal 
virtual computer, the internet as operating system.

  I've been dreaming this dream for years. At my conference on 
peer-to-peer networking, web services, and distributed computation back 
in 2001, Clay Shirky, reflecting on "Lessons from Napster", retold the 
old story about Thomas J. Watson, founder of the modern IBM. "I see no 
reason for more than five of these machines in the world," Watson is 
reputed to have said. "We now know that he was wrong," Clay went on. 
The audience laughed knowingly, thinking of the hundreds of millions, 
if not billions, of computers deployed worldwide. But then Clay 
delivered his punch line: "We now know that he overstated the number by 
four."

  Pioneers like Google are remaking the computing industry before our 
eyes. Google of course isn't one computer -- it's a hundred thousand 
computers, by report -- but to the user, it appears as one. Our 
personal computers, our phones, and even our cars, increasingly need to 
be thought of as access and local storage devices. The services that 
matter are all going to run on the global virtual computer that the 
internet is becoming.

  Until I heard about gmail, I was convinced that the future "internet 
operating system" would have the same characteristics as Linux and the 
Internet. That is, it would be a network-oriented operating system, 
consisting of what David Weinberger calls "small pieces loosely joined" 
(or more recently and more cogently, a "world of ends"). I saw this as 
an alternative to operating systems that work on the "one ring to rule 
them all principle" -- a monolithic architecture where the application 
space is inextricably linked with the operating system control layers. 
But gmail, in some sense, shows us that once storage and bandwidth 
become cheap enough, a more tightly coupled, centralized architecture 
is a real alternative, even on the internet. (I have to confess that 
was one of the wake up calls to me in Rich Skrenta's piece, linked to 
above.)

  But in the end, I believe that the world we're building is too complex 
for tight coupling to be the dominant paradigm. It will be a long time, 
if ever, before any one company is in control of enough programs and 
enough devices and enough data to start dictating to consumers and 
competitors what innovations will be allowed. We're entering a period 
of renewed competition and innovation in the computer industy, a period 
that will utterly transform the technology world we know today.

  I love Dave Stutz's phrase, "software above the level of a single 
device." We're used to thinking of software as something that runs on 
the machine in front of us, its complex dance hidden by the blank metal 
and plastic of the hardware that houses it. But now, computers are 
everywhere, and each dance has many partners, a whirling exchange of 
data that will be made visible when and where we want it. It's not the 
machine or even the software that matters, it's the information and 
services that travel over the hardware and software "wires." Gmail's 
introduction of large amounts of free online storage for application 
data is an important next step in freeing us from the shackles of the 
desktop.

  This isn't to say that there aren't important issues raised by the 
internet paradigm shift. The big question to me isn't privacy, or 
control over software APIs, it's who will own the data. What's critical 
is that gmail makes a commitment to data migration capabilities, so the 
service isn't a one way door to the future. I want to be able to switch 
to alternate providers if the competition makes a better offer. The 
critical enabler is going to be the ability to extract my data and 
connections so that I can work with them on multiple devices, for 
example, syncing my laptop or phone with my gmail account rather than 
having to work only in a tethered fashion. I understand why gmail 
doesn't offer this feature now, but it's going to be essential in the 
long term.

  Tim O'Reilly is founder and CEO of O'Reilly & Associates and an 
activist for Internet standards and for open source software. For 
everything Tim, see tim.oreilly.com.