Gmail is too creepy

[EvilKernel]

http://www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com/gcook.html

http://www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com/


Thirty-one organizations urge Google to suspend Gmail

Privacy Risks presented by Gmail

 

[MYOB]

And? Hotmail does the same or worse with your data, Walla certainly does worse with it.

I get a lot of mail, I like to keep it, I need webmail. Hence I use GMail.

 

[EvilKernel]

Well, suit yourself. I guess that could be true, I have not checked hotmail's agreement. It does suck if they use keywords in your emails to tailor advertisements to you.

At any rate, to those of you wanting to check out the service, you can go to ebay and there you can find people giving the invites for FREE. That's right, just sort by price and you will see some for 0.01 cents. The sellers in question just put 0.01 cent because ebay requires a price, but in reality they are free and you get the invite emailed to you after the auction ends (lots of them are 'buy it now' auctions).

What do these people get in return you ask?: Your positive feedback

L8r

 

[Didou]

Tim O'Reilly on Gmail

 

[EvilKernel]

Well, O'Reilly does bring up good points, but then again that is his opinion. Some people are willing to sacrifice privacy in exchange for functionality. O'Reilly seems to be one of those people.

I do not mind getting banners or ads for a service that is free. I do however mind if the advertisement I receive is based on the content of my personal email. The excuse of it being software doing the scanning and not a human being, makes no difference to me. Actually, the fact that google uses that as an excuse shows what their thinking is with regards to the privacy of their users.

O'Reilly also points out that this type of targeting advertesiment happens everywhere. This however does not justify google doing so.

Noone is forcing you to sign up for the service, O'Reilly points out. Well, we could apply that statement to many of the things we consider illegal and all of the sudden they become legal: Why put drug dealers in jail? no one is forcing people to buy from them.

Just my two cents.

 

[MYOB]

I give out invites actually free, without any need for eBay feedback needed
Got 6 ATM, PMme if needed.

Oh, and even by using Google's search engine you get targeted ads. And you also get semi-targeted ads by listening to a Clear Channel station

If you want to be paranoid, be paranoid about something *serious*. Not advertisements.

 

[Mikael]

https://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=14613 --- Plenty of Gmail invites are floating around that thread as well. :grinthumb

 

[Didou]

Originally posted by EvilKernel
I do not mind getting banners or ads for a service that is free. I do however mind if the advertisement I receive is based on the content of my personal email. The excuse of it being software doing the scanning and not a human being, makes no difference to me.

Do you really think Hotmail & other free web based Emails can detect spam Emails only by looking at the Email's subject ?

O'Reilly also points out that this type of targeting advertesiment happens everywhere. This however does not justify google doing so.

I prefer getting a small text ad that might actually interest me, on the side rather then a big flashy banner everywhere else. & there's the fact that I agree to that ad when I create an account so it's normal that I should get to see it. However, I do not agree that the people I happen to write Emails to should see ads. I don't want my Emails to have a "Get a yahoo 100mb email for free !!!" signature or something of the likes every single time.

Noone is forcing you to sign up for the service.

That's the bottom line.

 

[EvilKernel]

Well, I'd like to try it out to see how often it happens...

 

[EvilKernel]

btw

Has anybody used this yet? This sounds pretty cool... supports all basic commands too. I will give it a try. Sounds like a good way to put those 1000MB to use...

http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmail-filesystem.html

GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. GmailFS is a Python application and uses the FUSE userland filesystem infrastructure to help provide the filesystem, and libgmail to communicate with Gmail.

GmailFS supports most file operations such as read, write, open, close, stat, symlink, link, unlink, truncate and rename. This means that you can use all your favourite unix command line tools to operate on files stored on Gmail (e.g. cp, ls, mv, rm, ln, grep etc. etc.).