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Resist GMail

Revised January 19, 2007

Google's new "GMail" service is an insidious step in the commercialization of personal life.

Consider where we've come to thus far. Fast foods have already displaced much of the family dinner. HMOs have colonized the relationship between the healer and sick. Soft drink companies have colonized the public schools. Public Radio managers refer not to their "audience" but to their "market". One could imagine even more extreme examples, of course — a whole society like the Truman Show, where vendors give you free services and goods if you agree to product placement and advertising in ones home. Other ghoulish possibilities are already the subject of urban legends: deregulation to promote "the economy" comes to include one's body parts for "the transplant market" (even here, inroads are being made). Such visceral images are not evoked by GMail. GMail seems rather banal.

But GMail is a very significant advance in the commercialization of personal life.

Technologically, of course, GMail is a trivial advance. Google has simply applied the technology it perfected for placing advertisements among the results of anonymous (or so we believe) queries to its search engine. Google simply applies the same sort of data-mining to the content of people's e-mail. And consumers have already become numbed to the presence of advertising in their e-mails from standard free e-mail services. The only difference is that the content of that advertising is now geared to the content of what people are writing in their letters.

Of course, we are told that Google's data-mining "respects privacy", and that there are no humans peering in on our personal communications—just a robot that serves up advertisements. To accept such assurances may seem reasonable, but it invests an enormous amount of trust in strangers. Here is where I show my conservative stripes: I don't trust strangers that way.

The questions about privacy and anonymity have received the greatest attention by critics of GMail. An often missed point is that when you write to someone at a GMail address, Google now has your personally identifiable information (name, e-mail address and IP number) and so any searches you do with Google will no longer be anonymous, but can be recorded under your identification (via the IP address link). This is not new: it has been the case for users of other services that include both e-mail or other logged-in accounts and Web searching. But as Ryan Singel writes on August 15, 2008:

AT&T rightly points out that Google can know almost as much a snooping ISP could -- which, is the case for users who install Google's toolbar and don't know to opt out of Google's Web History program. And if Google does combine its third-party cookie information, with user's search histories, with Gmail summaries, and with Google Analytics data, among other data sources, they would be a proper domestic intelligence agency.

And Andrew Pauxtis and Dr. Bruce White write, in Online Consumer Protection: Theories of Human Relativism:

“With hundreds of millions of logged searches each day, a search engine like Google can analyze everything from cultural and economic trends right on down to what a given user is thinking or feeling based on their searched queries. This collection of information is a smoking stockpile of marketing data that can then be utilized to build or better render other personalized, content-targeted services.”
And ABC News ran this story by Michael S. Malone, "Is Google Turning Into Big Brother?" on September 5, 2008:
For example, a couple weeks ago, in a barely noticed blog entry, reporter Clint Boulton of Computerworld recounted a conversation he'd had with a Google insider who admitted that whatever the company was saying publicly -- and to Congress -- about user privacy, it was indeed tracking not just user search trails, but also their identities -- so-called "Deep Packet Inspection." The entry drew few readers, and no comments, but it did attract attention from one source: A senior Google executive called the magazine to get it to back off the story.

Even if true, had Google lied to Congress about user privacy? Probably not -- at least not in the way that Google had carefully phrased its words.

But leaving aside these privacy questions, GMail is more insidious than that. It is perhaps the first time in history that a mass market has been created for the sale of one's personal communications with others. It has never been technologically feasible before. Farmers could put advertisements for national brands on their barns and receive some compensation---but that was about the scale of it before GMail.

But now, there is a market for the content of your mail. If I write you at your GMail account, I know that GMail.com will data-mine what I write, and use the content to send advertisements that will be displayed along with my letter to you and billed to their advertisers. I can't simply write to you. I have to think about the ads that my words will trigger, and whether I want these particular ads to appear. The marketplace has dissolved another barrier to its expansion. The marketplace has colonized another piece of personal space. Or it is trying to. Whether it will succeed in breaking into the sanctuary of private communication depends on the character of the people — whether we acquiesce or whether we resist.

I, for one, believe that GMail should be killed in its birth. I will resist it however I can. For starters, I am using the handy "Rules" feature of Mail.app in Mac OS X to create a GMail resistance response.


I am putting this Web page up to encourage others to resist GMail as well. Please send me your thoughts or tales of your acts of resistance. I will add them anonymously (or credited if you wish) to this site.

-- Lee Altenberg