GMail hits privacy hurdle

As I mentioned in a recent post, GMail is about to be launched (they are in beta at the moment) with a massive e-mail service. The idea is that you can store all of your e-mails (up to a gig's worth) and you'll be able to search and trawl them as efficiently as Google trawls and searches it's massive web-index. Lovely idea, and I reckon it will be quite handy when you consider that I use Google to search for articles on Microsoft's own web-site because it's better than the Microsoft search! The crux of the matter is that it turns out that the point of GMail is so Google can actually trawl your e-mail to target you with advertising. Privacy conerns have been raised. I am sure GMail will respond by saying that the whole process is automated and there is no human intervention; not a great argument. Anyway, privacy isn't about who is collecting and using your information it is about whether you allowed that in the first place! Let's see how Google implement this.