More Google Paranoia

It's interesting to me, the way that some journalists are getting hot under the collar about Googlecreep (the tendency of Google to take over the world). Here's an article by John Naughton om the Guardian:

"If you think that's creepy, you're right. Google's response is that the messages aren't actually 'read', that it's just a process akin to the one in which email messages are scanned by spam-blocking software. But that's disingenuous, because the ads selected for display are logged (they have to be, so that advertisers can be billed) and those logs will inevitably reveal something of the context, if not the content, of the scanned messages. Anyone who uses Gmail is therefore sacrificing a degree of privacy compared with someone who uses a conventional email service.

I'm not denying that I'd prefer to have ad-free email. On the other hand, I can honestly say that - even though I've known about the ads from the beginning - I have never, ever noticed an ad in my gmail account. I couldn't even tell you if they're really there. I'll go and look in a minute, but I've never paid them the slightest bit of attention. As to the question of logging and context, again, I don't think an advertiser would be billed unless you clicked on one of the ads. So: don't click. And if you don't even notice them anyway, you're not going to click.

Now, as to email being read by a machine - well, that's not like it being read by a person, is it? And what is creepy is the thought that, if I used my work email address for all my personal email (as loads of people do), it's a trivial matter for my local IT administrator, and through him my employer, to read all my emails. Even if I delete them.

Now, I'm not saying Google is perfect, but come on - let's get things in perspective. The fact is that it's easier to maintain your privacy by mixing up your personal noise with the personal noise of millions of other people. Sure, the FBI might one day go looking for terrorist buzzwords in gmail, but I seriously doubt if that would be an effective use of their time. As for the advertising, well, advertising is everywhere. I think the fact that I haven't noticed it at all in gmail is a tribute to the service, whereas I notice advertising in regular emails from other services all the time - mainly because a lot of the email I receive is bloody advertising.

And since the Guardian web sites all feature advertising (some of which takes so long to load that the page doesn't display completely before you've finished reading the article), I wonder why their journalists are so concerned, and what their real motives are. Paranoia rubs both ways.

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Update: I've just checked some of the (few) personal emails on my gmail account (as opposed to the advertising mail and order confirmations from online shopping), and couldn't find a single ad. I just checked the Guardian website again: still has ads.