There has been much noise recently about Google's new mail service and its privacy policy. Specifically, the biggest concern appears to be the storage of the email itself. What should have been the service's main selling point (who has 1GB worth of email sitting around anyway?) is now the biggest point of contention. "What will they do with all that information".
I have to admit, the privacy policy is worded pretty ambiguously and leaves many open doors for all kinds of nefarious schemes.
We will never rent, sell or share information that personally identifies you for marketing purposes without your express permission.
"But we will happily sell all other information". I suppose that in itself isn't quite as bad as it sounds. What company doesn't sell their customer information these days? We sell ourselves and our info for a discount at a grocery store, why not for a mail service. Note, it specifies "for marketing purposes".. so does this mean they will for other purposes?
Residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account.
What exactly is "residual copies" of email? What conceivable reason would Google have for storing more than one copy of an email (other than backups, obviously) on their system? Considering Google is using the content of the email to target ads, this is probably something as simple as using a sampling of email to test and improve their targeting algorithm.. but if that's all it is, I wish they would say as much in the privacy policy.
Google employees do not access the content of any mailboxes unless you specifically request them to do so (for example, if you are having technical difficulties accessing your account) or if required by law, to maintain our system, or to protect Google or the public.
This is the biggest open door. "Protect Google" -- who defines what is needed to protect Google? Of course.. Google, in other words, as long as they can justify "it's good for the company" they can do what they please.
The policy is pretty badly written, leaves too many questions and doesn't explain Google's intentions as clearly as it should, but I would think they're too big of a company to get away with anything too nefarious for too long. I have a feeling that thanks to all the noise this is causing, we'll see an amended policy within days.
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I feel that the privacy policy was quite simply poorly worded. At least it isn't hard to conceive well meant intentions behind the ambiguous phrases.
Where they talk of sharing information, they might be talking about the use patterns/statistics of groups of users at large.
The residual copies might simply be due to remotely located tape backups; of course they can't kill all of those the second you request that your account be deleted.
Accessing mailboxen sounds much like a blanket statement, although I can imagine someone making it without any nefarious intentions to protect cases of abuse.
Of course, that doesn't make the current PP any less susceptible to abuse, and no, as long as they clarify, I will not consider signing up either.
#Err, until they clarify, that is.
#I believe the so-called residual copies of the e-mails are a side-effect of the way their file system works. Assuming that they will use the same kind of file system they use for search data (documented at http://www.cs.rochester.edu/sosp2003/papers/p125-ghemawat.pdf">http://www.cs.rochester.edu/sosp2003/papers/p125-ghemawat.pdf),">http://www.cs.rochester.edu/sosp2003/papers/p125-ghemawat.pdf ), which makes a lot of sense, stray copies of data will end up all over the place simply as a result of they way they manage disk space and disk operations.
Still, if this is indeed the case, I do think the policy could be a little more straight-forward about what, exactly, they're talking about.
Another possible reason to have "residual copies" (that another semi-large webmail service provider did), and keep indexes about which mails to present to different users. That provider felt this system greatly simplified their backup system (and general maintaince).
#Doesn't everybody have gigabytes of email sitting around? I know I have for years.
#The following policies are in place at Yahoo:
* We limit access to personal information about you to employees who we believe reasonably need to come into contact with that information to provide products or services to you or in order to do their jobs. http://privacy.yahoo.com/
* Please note that any information that we have copied may remain in back-up storage for some period of time after your deletion request. This may be the case even though no information about your account remains in our active user databases.
http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy/us/archives/details.html
Sounds exactly the same as Google.
Also:
* Yahoo! collects personal information when you register with Yahoo!, when you use Yahoo! products or services, when you visit Yahoo! pages or the pages of certain Yahoo! partners, and when you enter promotions or sweepstakes. Yahoo! may combine information about you that we have with information we obtain from business partners or other companies.
* Yahoo! uses information for the following general purposes: to customize the advertising and content you see, fulfill your requests for products and services, improve our services, contact you, conduct research, and provide anonymous reporting for internal and external clients.
Can somebody explain why Google is under fire but Yahoo is not?
Hello,
Let me introduce ourselves. We are the operators of www.gmails.co.uk . On the site you will see a brand new Google Gmail question and answer forum which we intend to build on with membership in the future. We wish to build a team of experts at a forum for this exciting new product.
Regards,
John Carver
www.gmails.co.uk
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