News.com reports:
A California state senator said Monday she was drafting legislation to block Google’s free e-mail service “Gmail” because it would place advertising in personal messages after searching them for key words.
“We think it’s an absolute invasion of privacy. It’s like having a massive billboard in the middle of your home,” said Sen. Liz Figueroa, a Democrat from Fremont, Calif.
“We are asking them to rethink the whole product,” she said.
In late March, the Web search giant announced plans to launch Gmail–a service that would offer users 1GB of free storage, more than 100 times the storage offered by other free services from Yahoo and Microsoft.
But in return for the extra storage, users would agree to let Google’s technology scan their incoming e-mail, then deliver targeted ads based on key words in the messages. For instance, a user receiving a message about a friend’s flu symptoms might also receive ads for cold and flu remedies. . . .
Uh, and if I agree to have a massive billboard in the middle of my home — in exchange for a discount on some service that I’d like to buy — what exactly is wrong with that? People have lots of options in e-mail services. Google is offering one extra option, under which users would voluntarily surrender their privacy in exchange for some goodies. Why should users be spared from that?
Presumably Ms. Figueroa really doesn’t want anyone other than the recipients looking at her e-mail, even if that’s a computer program that doesn’t report the contents to anyone but just tailors advertising to her. In that case, I have an innovative surprising high-tech patent-pending solution for her . . . don’t use Gmail! But if some people think it’s just fine to have Google tailor advertising based on the contents of their message, why should she stop them?
I realize that there are sometimes plausible arguments for saving people from their own folly; I don’t always agree with them, but I respect them — for instance, if their folly seems likely to get them killed (consider bans on dueling, seat belt laws, and the like), or likely to get them addicted and thus drastically diminish their ability to undo their error (that’s a common justification for bans on certain drugs), or likely to seriously harm others as well as themselves.
What’s striking about this proposal is how utterly inapplicable those arguments are here. The Nanny State (or, at this point, one of its directors) is trying to save us from the irreversible, appalling horror of getting custom-tailored advertising based on the context of our e-mail. We’re in trouble indeed.
UPDATE: A couple of people suggested that the bill might be trying to protect senders from gmail’s learning things about them. But as best I can tell from press accounts, gmail would only be connecting information about a gmail user’s e-mail with that gmail user, and using it to market to that gmail user.
When I send a message to someone, I understand that the person might report its contents to others, which is why I’m often quite cautious with confidential e-mail; so even if gmail somehow associated this information with my name, and then either used that to market to me or publicized that information, I’m not sure how much of a legitimate objection I would have to that. But there at least there’d be serious room for debate. If, however, my understanding is right, then my messages to a gmail user are not associated with me in the gmail output — they’re just associated with the gmail user. And if the user agreed to that, I see no grounds for me as the sender to complain.
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