An Observation on Gmail

Thanks for posting this discussion; Gmail has a lot of really impressive, innovative features, and given what a success that could make it, we'd better getting talking about its flaws before the public release! I agree privacy concerns about Gmail are worth raising, but I do fear that things are being a bit overblown. It's worrying, for example, that they'd keep your e-mail on file (for data-mining purposes, I suppose) even after you have deleted an account. But the invasions of privacy that they've actually proposed to commit are really pretty small potatoes: tokenizing the contents of your e-mail for you to search them, and using that to feed into an automated ad-serving system (which doesn't sell any of that information to marketers) seems pretty innocuous, and certainly a lot less invasive than the sort of selling of user data that services like Hotmail and Yahoo! routinely indulge in. If nothing else, you can always opt out of the system using any kind of encryption (from GPG down to ROT13...)

Even apart from concerns about privacy, though, there are good reasons to be up in arms about Gmail: in particular, their webmail interface was apparently designed as an extended exercise in making blind people's lives harder. (Worse, their main motive in this seems to have been to safeguard their intellectual property from being reverse-engineered and re-used in unauthorized ways...). I sure hope that Google rethinks their plans for the interface, because nobody with a conscience could release a product that discriminates against the blind like this...