April 13, 2004

Less about Gmail

The Center for Democracy and Technology sums up the outcry about Google's new mail service, Gmail, quite well: "Moreover, it is important to note that most of the privacy concerns associated with Gmail are the same as or similar to concerns posed by other similar services, albeit heightened because of the magnitude of what GMail is proposing." See the full CDT report here.

All the complaints about how Google is doing something wrong miss the point: Google is doing it openly, as compared to AOL, MSN, YahooMail, etc. Further, Gmail's terms of use, privacy policy, and program policies documents are much easer to read and understand than those of the (future) competition.

And the ads supposedly related to the messages can sometimes be humorous. I complained to the support team that Gmail has problems with Safari, and they replied nicely, saying "we are committed to making our product available to as many people as possible, and supporting as many browsers and platforms as possible". (Mac users: when was the last time you heard such positive intentions?). The "related" ad was "Java Error? Fix It Now"... Posted by lookit at April 13, 2004 09:04 AM