So the issue of privacy of email in Google's Gmail has been a highly discussed topic as of late. Though I'm not yet a user of that service, I'm curious about it so I looked at the Gmail website. I read through their privacy policy, which seemed pretty standard (no Trust-e certification though), and came across a provision that states that "No human reads your email to target ads or related information to you without your consent."
Alright, so people won't be prying into email to sort out what kind of advertising should be targeted to users. But a question that comes to my mind, and was not clarified by tha privacy policy, is wheter individual records of advertising are kept, and if so what becomes of them.
It seems to me almost just as bad for privacy to have your email read to aim advertisements at you as it would be if for a record of the advertisements sent to your Gmail to be tracked by other people. That could lend itself to indirectly figure out, or at least attempt to do so, what you could have possibly been writing about.