<quote>
Given the fact that gmail wants to read your mails (or atleast it
intended to read your mails at some point of time before this privacy
issue came up), i would certainly not look at it as an anti-spam
measure. Infact they would be spamming me! (ok, its not "spam". its
"ADs". Whatever, I wouldn't be comfortable with an AD on body-part
enhancement when I'm writing a mail to Dr.Mathrubhootham)
</quote>
Actually, I'm going to say...why won't you be comfortable? Now, think
about it for a second. No other human being will ever read about
your...er...problems. And before you say that this is not guaranteed, I
would like to remind you that Google actually does guarantee that no one
reads your mail. So if some human does read your mail, they would be
breaking the law.
<quote>
GMail certainly does not sound NON-EVIL to me.
</quote>
Fine..if you think its evil, don't use it. They're giving you a LOT of
features that no current web mail provider can even hope to match. If I
were Google, I would be looking at what I can get in return. There is no
such thing as a free lunch...
As for the ads, I would like to say 2 things
1. Going by Google's track record with Google Ads, I'm willing to bet
that these ads are really,really targeted. Say that you get a mail from
your friend about the Matrix Online...and lets say you see an ad for
cheap Neo/Matrix sunglasses/t-shirts at a shop near you. I definitely
won't mind such ads...and even more since the screenshots do show that
the ads are REALLY unobtrusive.
2. All the beta-testers who have blogged about it say that the ads
appear only for a few emails and they're really not annoying. Google is
not dumb...I'm sure that they'll be careful not to piss users off...as
they always have been. Google has an amazing track record of keeping the
users interests in mind...no reason to doubt them now.
As for me, I would definitely sign-up for a Gmail account. So what if I
get ads related to the mail I read? I'm getting an unbelievable set of
features for free.
Regards,
Sriram
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I blog at http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/weblog/sriram
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