Fwd: philosophical question about gmail

[Chris Brenton]

On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 15:41, Jeff Macdonald wrote:
>
> Well, this issue hasn't really cropped up until now, because I can't
> recall a single email provider in the past whose mantra was to scan
> incoming emails for content and provide ads/generate revenue from
> that.

It sort of has, people have complained in the past about the list not
being "private" because its being archived. You can check one such
archive for the thread at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/gnhlug-discuss%40mail.gnhlug.org/

;-)

Now granted this is a bit different because the result is the person
with the gmail account gets presented with an ad. Guess I personally
don't see that as a big deal as there is nothing that Google can get out
of the data that anyone else could not get as well by crawling through
the public archive.

> You *could* use a service with less storage that didn't scan incoming
> mail.  But as a third party, I had no choice in the matter -- because
> you (apparently) subscribed to the GNHLUG now my mails are being
> scanned by Gmail...

Again, if the e-mails are "out there" for anyone to see, I guess I don't
see the big deal. I mean someone in Asia could be creating a user
profile on you as we type based on the archive info. At least with gmail
one or more list members are getting something out of it. ;-)

Regards,
Chris