It's not just a private interaction between two consenting parties. It's a contract that grants power to a third party eliminating traditional legal guarantees of quasi-privacy in communication from sender to recipient, one of which is not a party to the contract. There's no guarantee the average sender would know that mail to gmail is intercepted and parsed. And this differs from normal mail how? most free email services add advert footers, and many email servers offer virus and spam filtering via just such a parsing method. the Google advertising system has for a fair while now offered a number of "targetted" services, ranging from bought links displayed (differentiated) on search results keyed on certain words, to targetted links for "advertisting supported" browsing packages that are appropriate to the websites visited using that package. Google are careful to point out that
Justin wrote: the actual user is in no way identified before or after the parsing - the parsing engine merely identifies the appropriate advert, then drops the data and moves on to the next job.... besides, if you want privacy in email, you encrypt - although the mind boggles as to what googleads you would get for cryptotext.