It’s official: Wired Magazine has placed worrying about privacy on Gmail in the final column marked “expired.” (What’s “wired”? Worrying about privacy on Google Health.) Yet here I am, continuing to fret over Google’s eons-old practice of scanning incoming and outgoing messages in order to display contextual ads.
In my defense, I don’t think some evil Google Adwords employee is sitting in his brightly lit hexagonical reading through my email and twisting an ironic mustache. I recognize that it’s a dispassionate (for now) computer that scans for keywords and selects contextual ads.
My concern has to do with competition: Gmail puts Google’s advertisers in a position to use the content of their competitors’ emails to compete with them.
Let’s say you and I are writing back and forth because you’ve shown interest in purchasing my bicycle – a 2006 Schwinn Pea Picker. If you’re a Gmail subscriber, and regardless of whether I am, Google will scan my emails to you and use my words – “2006,” “Schwinn,” “bicycle” – to display bikes of this description for sale by its clients. Google may even combine this information with knowledge of your basic whereabouts, providing you with local options.
Maybe that’s nice for you. But what about me? Why should Google be able to scan the content of my emails, without notice or consent, and use them to facilitate competition against me? I submit that real economic harm must result from time to time from this practice.
Ok. So I’m a tired dinosaur who, in between dodging asteroids, still worries about Gmail content-scanning. What do I want? I want an opt-out. If there were an opt-out, which Microsoft Rex offers in a comparable product, Google could credibly claim that the Gmail subscriber has asked for ads of relevance to her discussions. In that case, we can say that my gripe is with you – the savvy purchaser who wants to see if I’m selling my bike at market value – not with Gmail.
I know, I know. I’m supposed to let this go. It's uncharitable and, worse, unfashionable to criticize Gmail. Sorry, but I can't help it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some business in Bedrock.