Fornicalia Lawmaker Moves to Block Gmail

[Bill Stewart]

At 01:22 PM 4/14/2004, Justin <justin-cypherpunks at 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 :-)

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Bill Stewart  bill.stewart at pobox.com