Google Ate My Email: The Real Cost of Free Email

Those creepy Google folks are at it again...  this time playing fast and loose with your email "privacy".

Back in 2004 in an open letter to Google's founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page the World Privacy Forum and 30 other privacy rights groups complain that Google is proposing to "scan[ning] the text of all incoming emails for ad placement."  They also complain that "Google's overall data retention and correlation policies are problematic" and "the Gmail system sets potentially dangerous precedents and establishes reduced expectations of privacy in email communications."  And finally they speculate "Google could -- tomorrow -- by choice or by court order, employ its scanning system for law enforcement purposes."

Really?  Just ask Belgian gunrunner Jacques Monsieur (aka the "Field Marshal") about using gmail (see this).  This idiot ran his international arms trading business with gmail!  I guess he believe the Google hype about maintaining his "privacy"...

Ah, the real cost of free email services.

I've written about this before: "Trespassing for Your Own Good" and "Google: The New Big Brother."

Complaints like those from seven years ago apparently continue to fall on deaf ears...

Google is a very large corporation.  Their primary job is to make money for their shareholders.  That is what corporations do.  They are not charities and they are not run to make people feel good about themselves or anything else.  After all, Sergey and Larry have to keep up with the Joneses, er, Bezoses and Musks - private space flight companies don't come cheap.

No, what's much more interesting here is the fine line Google play's in keep up the appearance of being "on of us" while working hard at the same time to be that "very large corporation."

Google wants you to believe that they are infallible - but they are not.  Just ask the folks whose gmail accounts were recently trashed.  The Google "cloud" just lost about 150,000 accounts worth of email - poof - just like that.  According to Wired.com one gmail user wrote “My contacts are intact, but nothing else,” another aggrieved Gmail user wrote. “The folders have reset to default, my signature line is blank, the ‘theme’ is changed back to the default and — of course — every single email from the last 7 years has vanished completely.”

Seven years of email lost.

Imagine if you were involved in a court case or some other legal nonsense.  You would be left telling the judge that "Google ate my email." 

And then there is the question of is it really lost?  Don't they run backups?  Don't they keep copies of anything?

I guess they really do take your email seriously...  (This sort of no-backup-we-don't-have-to-worry-because-everything-is-redundant magical thinking is not really a surprise if you read their technical papers on things like gfs (google file system)...)

Isn't that the point of the "cloud"?

No, the more time goes by the more I start to believe that Google is really a corporate victim of the "Peter Principle:" In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.  And that's if you believe that their search results are really reliable, i.e., that their competence is really in search - which is also questionable (see this on Google's recent "adjustment" of its search algorithm).

On the search side apparently Google didn't like the fact that Overstock.com was using promos on .edu sites to talk up its products like "vacuum cleaners."  Why is that?  Apparently Google ranks .edu site results higher than sites from those of us that work in more lowly areas like business (see this article).

Now I use Google a lot but I don't necessarily believe what it tells me, i.e., it might find things but, being an old fashioned geezer, I take its help for what its worth - free help is usually not much better than no help.  Finding something is not the same as believing where it appears on the Google search is meaningful.

Google as a tools is good for finding sources, not for ranking them.

Remember that Google is about finding the most popular results - not the "best" (in whatever abstract sense you might want to define "best") results.  And since Google makes money off the "results" it finds you can bet that the specific "algorithms" being used (which are of course secret and proprietary and never openly displayed) are optimized for billions in profits.

Sadly Google is a scam for all those poor idiots folks who think they are getting the "best deal" on free.  Much like a business partner I had who once found the absolute cheapest web phone (Sun Rocket) - and it was cheap right up until it went bust because it was so cheap it could pay to even provide service let alone make a profit.