I’m stumped on this one. A friend recently invited me into gmail (we’re – what is it – 18 months into the beta version now?) and late one night having mysteriously failed to configure my existing BTYahoo account for use with Thunderbird I turned to gmail, which was very easy indeed. So I impulsively told all my friends that it would be gmail from now on.
I’ve been a Google user for a long time now, and observed the criticism ramping up – pretty much in proportion to Google’s size and aspirations. But they don’t quite convince me. About privacy I wonder could any ISP or email provider refuse a govermnent request for information? Google already has I think, the other month – denied search data to the US goverment – – whereas Yahoo complied. Not sure if that’s up-to-date. Plus we have the FBI’s Carnivore, which is already scanning email on the basis that machines are not humans and no privacy is being compromised. I have it on good authority that Carnivore is crap, but still… Besides, most, if not all, services store emails, and most ISPs scan them. Imperfect as it is, Gmail’s privacy policy is easy to find and leaves a lot less to the imagination that my old BTYahoo one, or the Hotmail one (the BBC’s is excellent – I recently signed up to play at predicting the next episode of The Apprentice). At least Google’s tells you that your emails are stored. I don’t even know what BT does with my emails. Basically on privacy, I’m not sure that this isn’t a legal problem rather than exclusively a service provider one. The Net seems to be closing in on our digital rights.
Google’s advert generation on the back of all this email scanning is also a bother (though not a particular distraction – I have enough trouble noticing what’s in the centre of my monitor, let alone anything that discreet). But it’s not spyware, and if it’s as ephemeral as they say I don’t really have a problem with my free services being funded by advertising.
The censorship on google.cn. Maybe I’m naive, but isn’t ‘breaking into China’ that the kind of thing that all PLCs dream of? And wouldn’t missing the opportunity of China be a mortal wound? Alright, self-censorship is an enormous compromise, and if I were Google I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole, but then again I wouldn’t have floated and I’d be a not-for-profit collective. Google’s regular search engine is still available in China, providing a useful comparison the transparently self-censored Google with the rubbish, slowed-down Government-censored one. And Google self-censors in several countries that make a crime out of Holocaust denial – and god knows what else.
Of course I care about privacy and freedom of speech – if I find anything better than Google, I’ll use it. Or if I find a proper reason – specific to Google over and above all the other providers out there – why I really shouldn’t use it, I’ll stop.