Gmail

Here's a good article about why people need to stop fussing about Gmail. Myself, I've never been concerned (except about being able to sign up quick enough to get a decent address - well, and whether it was an April Fools joke). Personally, I wouldn't use the address for anything exceedingly personal anyway.

But beyond that, I don't see why privacy advocates were getting so upset. It's not like Google was trying to be deceptive - they said right upfront that machines would scan mail in order to target ads. And what's so bad about that? Google already does it on all our Blogger blogs and all our web searches. No one's cared about that. And no one was raising a fuss about Google's computers scanning every message for keywords in order to perform searches. Heck, that was the killer app.

O'Reilly Network: The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It's Bogus [Apr. 16, 2004]