Fornicalia Lawmaker Moves to Block Gmail
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A California state senator on Monday said she was drafting legislation to block Google Inc.'s free e-mail service "Gmail" because it would place advertising in personal messages after searching them for key words. http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040412/wr_nm/tech_google_dc_1 A private interaction between two consenting parties has absolutely nothing to do with the state, period. The bitch supporting this shit should be removed from office forthwith. -- Riad Wahby rsw@jfet.org MIT VI-2 M.Eng
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A California state senator on Monday said she was drafting legislation to block Google Inc.'s free e-mail service "Gmail" because it would place advertising in personal messages after searching them for key words. Is she planning to block all the advertising supported email services, just
Riad S. Wahby wrote: those associated with search engines, or just those who actually try to make the ads relevent?
On Mon, 12 Apr 2004, Riad S. Wahby wrote:
A private interaction between two consenting parties has absolutely nothing to do with the state, period. The bitch supporting this shit should be removed from office forthwith.
And based on this [quite valid] criteria, we should remove 90+ percent of all the little vermin running around in various gubmints "protecting us". Instead of removing her, they'll likely reelect her for "watching out for their interests". :-(( -- "How do you change anything, except stand in one place and scream and scream and scream and then make more people come and stand in that place and scream and scream and scream?" Sally Fields
Riad S. Wahby (2004-04-13 01:49Z) wrote:
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040412/wr_nm/tech_google_dc_1
A private interaction between two consenting parties has absolutely nothing to do with the state, period. The bitch supporting this shit should be removed from office forthwith.
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. -- "You took my gun. It's just your word against mine!" "Not necessarily." -Bernie vs Tom, Miller's Crossing
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.
Since when is there a guarantee of privacy in email??
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.
Dave Howe (2004-04-13 14:11Z) wrote:
Justin wrote:
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
I'm not concerned with the advertising itself. My concern is that the Gmail service would provide an unacceptable level of detail on message content to whoever's monitoring the advertisement logs.
On Wed, Apr 14, at 08:22PM, Justin wrote: | I'm not concerned with the advertising itself. My concern is that the | Gmail service would provide an unacceptable level of detail on message | content to whoever's monitoring the advertisement logs. I only say something because I have seen this point before and find it ludicrous. How much more detail than the message itself does the advertizing agency need? Google is the one targetting the adds at its customers. Google is the organization with all the emails. If they want to know what's in your emails, they don't need to bother to come up with an elaborate scheme for it... "You never have to delete email" doesn't have to be an advertizing pitch for customers. Rather, it can be a nice nifty advertizing pitch for the feds. Why subpeana the advertizing logs when you can subpeana the emails themselves?
At 01:22 PM 4/14/2004, Justin <justin-cypherpunks@soze.net> wrote:
I'm not concerned with the advertising itself. My concern is that the Gmail service would provide an unacceptable level of detail on message content to whoever's monitoring the advertisement logs.
Unacceptable to whom, and what should they do about it if they don't accept it? If Joe Sixpack to trade the privacy issues for the convenience, because like most of the public his value systems prefer dancing pigs to security, that's his business, and if he doesn't, that's his business too. But if Liz Figueroa "doesn't accept it", and makes laws banning it, because she knows better than Joe what's good for him, well that's typical tacky legislator behaviour, and she need to be educated on why the free market really does make people more free. It would be especially tacky if she argued that Google was somehow abusing their quasi-monopolistic powers here - after all, there are probably over 1000 different free or cheap email providers out there, and you can look them up in Google, and of course many of them are out of her jurisdiction. Personally, I'm also concerned about the depth of detail that might or might not be visible to the advertisers. Do they get queries on keywords or phrases the way banner ads do? How much user information gets passed along with them? Does it only get passed if you click on the ad, or on all queries? Do the advertising calculations get done when the mail is received, or only when you read any given message, or also when you search your inbox for keywords? I'm guessing they don't do the former, because you'd otherwise see lots of banner ads for things you receive email about, and I get enough spam already, thank you :-) ---- Bill Stewart bill.stewart@pobox.com
participants (9)
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Bill Stewart -
Dave Howe -
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J.A. Terranson -
Justin -
Pete Capelli -
Riad S. Wahby -
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