Sunday GMail Update
eWeek continues its excellent coverage of the new GMail service and the controversy it has stirred up among privacy advocates.
Google Defends Scanning E-Mail for Ad Links
"To have free e-mail, you have to have ads," Nicole Wong, senior compliance counsel for Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, told attendees at the 2004 Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy here. "Ads are a great way to support free e-mail," she said.
Privacy advocates peppered Wong with questions about whether it is right to scan e-mail that comes to Gmail subscribers from other mail systems and whether the very act of scanning e-mail compromises users' privacy.
Wong held to Google's contention that isn't doing anything more than other e-mail services have been doing for years. "E-mail is already scanned. It is processed to detect viruses, and it is scanned for spam filtering," she said.
I've had a few readers take the e-mail challenge who have writen to me at mochant[at]gmail.com to see what kind of ads their message fetches.
Interestingly, a few messages that relly tried to be nothing more than a list of keywords failed to generate any links while narrative messages did much better. If you haven't written to me yet, give it a try. I will send you a small JPG image of the ads your test message generates.