A gmail Qualm

[Anonymous]

I know that a few weeks ago we had a huge gmail rush, and i don't know if any of you were aware of this, (you probably are, and i will sound really stupid), but gmail reads every mail you have before you do. In my opinion, this is an invasion of privacy, and i am not going to use thier services. Feel free to post your opinions here.

[Anonymous]

I never used Gmail, and I guess I won't start now

[Anonymous]

Nope, me niether.

[Anonymous]

Does it say in their terms and conditions about reading your mail?

[Anonymous]

Yes.

But they actually don't read it. They (they being the exact same crawlers that google uses to catalog the web) look for keywords and deliver "content" (ie. advertising) based on those keywords. Your email remains untouched by human eyes. So sayeth google.

So if you whine about your problems with insomnia a lot, you will get ads for sleeping pills.

That's also why they offer a gig of storage. So they can better target you by looking at your history and what you deemed important enough to save.

Anywho. If you send email over the internet and don't encrypt it anyone can read it anyway. If you're paranoid, use pgp. It's pretty good. Pun intended.

-g

[Anonymous]

Meh, I was never gonna use gmail for anything really important anyway.

[Anonymous]

They can read my mail as much as they want to, it's all norwegian and nothing secret.

[Anonymous]

......If I have to send something important to someone, I'll talk to them on the phone, mail it to them, or instant message them.  Email is always readable, gmail just uses it to your advantage, giving you a gig of space.

[Anonymous]

Well, most free email accounts probably do read your email at some point, they just don't tell you. Or they will find a loop hole in the terms and conditions.

[Anonymous]

hopefully likwid/FA staff isnt bored enough to read my @followtheangel.org email ;P

[Anonymous]

Haha, I hope not lol.

[Anonymous]

hopefully likwid/FA staff isnt bored enough to read my @followtheangel.org email ;P

The only thing he'd see in mine would be EBAY spam thanks to that shat free IPOD crap.

[Anonymous]

I don't know why people even bother with those "get crap for free" deals, because you always end up spending money...

[Anonymous]

Umm...

I didn't spend anything and got a free iPod and LCD monitor. That's over $700 of free stuff I got from that company.

And if you guys didn't want spam, you should have used a disposable e-mail adress like sneakemail.com  Duh!

But yeah, sometimes the Gmail ads are amusing. Like when my girlfriend e-mails me, it has ads for "The Graham Norton Effect", a sex talk show.

[Anonymous]

No email service is private. Email requires a  message to be stored on a server, which entitles the servers owner to make copies of said messages and read the messages whenever or however they want.

GMAIL, hotmail, yahoo, etc. They all have the right to read your email.

The following article, which I have clipped and excerpt from, explains this in very Limited detail. If you wanted to research it more this is a good strting point.

"People have the expectation that their email is private, that information in them is not going to be read by anyone other than the person it's sent to. In practice, law enforcement needs a wiretap order to look at someone's email. The owner of the email server could legally read subscriber email, but most have privacy policies and service agreements that say they won't.

But the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Massachusetts ruled that because email is briefly stored, it's not protected the same way as conversations or letters. That it was okay for a now defunct email service to copy subscribers' emails so it could go through them, The government alleged the company was reading subscribers email to its rival, Amazon.com, to try to better compete against the giant. "

http://www.nbc4.com/technology/3487303/detail.html