Peter Davoust <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Sun, 08 Oct 2006 11:42:54 -0400:
> You bring up an issue I wanted to ask about: Why wouldn't you use gmail as > your personal e-mail? I've heard people saying it's evil, and that google > is fascist, but I don't really know what to believe. Personally I like the > features that gmail offers, and I think it's great that it stores all my > mail ever sent so I can access my old e-mails still if my hard drive gets > wiped (which happens accidentally or not every month or so). Thoughts? For me (as it would seem the OP), it's the whole privacy thing. Google mines the data to serve ads, and associates that with your search profile as well (same google-wide master cookie, if I'm not mistaken). While supposedly no one ever looks at that, only machines, corporate policies can and do change. As well, if the data is there, it is subject to search warrant or with Bush run rampant over civil liberties, now with little or no control whatsoever -- all they have to do is say it's national security related to grab any existing records, pretty much, and it's getting worse, not better. Yes, there's the same deal to some extent with any mail, specifically anything that's not encrypted, even if both ends run their own servers, because it travels over the public internet and is subject to logging there. However, as I mentioned, I don't like the whole web interface thing that much either, and then there's the whole thing with the same company holding the search profile as well. As it is, I don't do cookies from Google as they are (with most of the rest of the net) set for no cookies (or session-only) by default. If google has a search profile on me, it's by IP only, and that changes. To get the link, they'd need to talk to my ISP, and while government can do that, one would hope google wouldn't be able to get that info from the ISP. So it's a personal privacy thing. No big deal for me tho as I never did their mail in the first place, so I just don't start. As for others, it's up to them. What they choose to do is their business. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
