The Modern Crazy

April 13th, 2004 - 11:14 | 1 comment

You know, in my head the phrase ‘privacy campaigners’ is becoming synonymous with ‘anarchist psycho whining paranoid nutcases’ (similarly ‘civil liberties groups’.) This is probably grossly unfair, but when all the publicity surrounding such groups is like this, you feel like hacking into their computers and putting their data online for the world to see. May I suggest that if you don’t like the idea of Gmail, you don’t use it? Is this a complicated concept?

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One Response to “The Modern Crazy”

1 Edward Apr 13th, 2004 at 4:55 pm

Quote:
Google shouldn’t be allowed to scan e-mails for any purpose. It’s like Royal Mail opening everyone’s mail, personal and business, reading the mail, making a note of any ‘key words’ and then resealing the mail including any applicable adverts. This is quite clearly not only an invasion of privacy but to my mind it would amount to opening up the channels for any kind of ’snooping’ of mails. How can we as a culture expect to move forward by depending upon technology if we cannot be assured of its security, even at the most basic of levels? If G-mail was to go ahead then the user should be given an ‘extremely’ clear choice of whether their mail can be scanned for these alleged ‘key words’ and the implications of such scanning. Additionally once the mail has been ‘downloaded’ from the G-mail server then the stored server mail should be deleted.
Jason , Basingstoke, England

Surely, it would be more like this, Jason:
Royal Mail sends your MAIL FOR FREE, but you get adverts stuck in. I’d not have a problem with that, but I’d ask that I could give you back all the spam to save resources etc.
At the moment, all your emails can be snooped, and you have nothing to protect you except encryption. Use this if you have such a problem. Then gmail would be useless -> what adverts would they show you?!?!?!?! PGP ads?! As for the downloading -> I think that there should be a time limit, since otherwise I’d run out of space.

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