"This Creepy Company Called Google"

This is a very well written personal reflection on Gmail and Google in general.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1337837/Google-Why-let-creepy-company-spy-emails.html

 

Oh, c'mon dude, this is from the *Daily Mail LOL ...

*Not a paper taken without a few pinches of salt in Britain.

 

It's a personal op-ed piece, "dude." Who cares what paper it was published in? It was simply one person's opinion. Consider it like a blog post if you wish.

 

I think that you are right :
"This is a very well written personal reflection on Gmail and Google in general."
Great article , with a lot of "food for thoughts".....
Please don't let those that loves "the sandman" more than being awake put you down...

Fiat Lux !!!

 

Not Surprising at all...

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Google does use the content of your emails for commercial gain.
It scans your words and searches for key words in the same way
it does when you use the Google search engine.

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It doesn’t, of course, explain why they also scan emails that arrive from [B]non-Gmail[/B] users.

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Hotmail and Yahoo – which both also rely on advertising,
but which [U]don’t appear[/U] to trawl through your emails
and hit you with intrusive ads  within milliseconds.

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While emails may seem ephemeral, they can be difficult to delete.
Once a  message is erased, it may take up to 60 days before it disappears from  the Google servers
- and Google admits that it keeps back-up copies in  case of system failure.

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 these vehicles [for Google Street View] were not just taking pictures,
but also searching  electronically for wireless networks, logging whether individuals had  secure or insecure wi-fi
– and gathering personal information.
It was a gross invasion of privacy and rightly caused an uproar.
Google quickly apologised, saying it was a mistake. 

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If Google is so ethical and friendly,
then how has it become a  sinister multinational giant
that spies on the contents of my personal  email?
As for me, I am switching back to the less sophisticated  Microsoft Office Outlook.
I’ve come to believe that [B]free email is worth exactly what you pay for it[/B].

 

I am English & the Daily Mail is the literary equivalent of the Jeremy Kyle show & just not taken seriously in my country by many.

It may very well be an interesting piece, unfortunately, I forgot that the British sense of irony doesn't always translate into a web forum easily.

In the UK, if you quote from the Mail it is essentially a political statement & the Daily Mail has become a bit of a euphemism for the unsophisticated & the extreme right-wing.

That was all I meant 'dude'.

It is just quite funny (to me anyway) for someone to quote or cite something from the Mail with a straight face without suggesting something either politically humorous or 'knowingly' subtextual.

It just struck me as funny, but I have a bit of a twisted sense of humour anyway, after all, I'm British ...

 

Can't wait for The Sun's views on this topic.

 

LOL!

 

So, all these issues are just imagination, ah?
The article author is just telling lies, ah?

 

No matter where the article was published, the author is IMO, uninformed and probably a bit naive.

Short of hitting a new user with a baseball bat, Google is extremely upfront about the targeted text ads. Complaining about this after signing up for Gmail is another example of a user agreeing to use a software product/service without reading the user agreement at all. Buyer beware if it bothers her...

As for email in general, the writer doesn't seem to understand that unencrypted email is, IMO, THE most open, insecure form of communication that exists. All her worries about Google perusing her email should probably put her more at ease. I would guess there's less of a chance of someone @ Google reading her email than someone at her ISP (or at a hop somewhere along her email's journeys.)

I have no problem someone giving their opinion on stuff. After all, I'm giving mine. But in this case, there were/are ways to avoid the issues in the article. Don't use software or a service unless you know what it is and how it works; and don't use regular email if you are concerned about privacy.

 

While I agree with many of things in this article most of it is old news. It has been reported time and time again about ads being placed based on text in your emails. I do agree that this a bit creepy and is part of the reason I dont use google or any of their services. That and the fact they snagged data off of peoples wireless networks. And the fact that the CEO has the attitude that people dont need to worry about having privacy as long they arent doing anything wrong.

 

Just to clear things up......

I know that most of what she mentions is old news. However, I thought the personal reflection from a non-techie, who had their first "creepy" experience with the ads matching up with her email conversations was interesting. That's all - just interesting. I never claimed there was groundbreaking new headlines in the piece.