Tuesday, April 13, 2004

You'd think they might have something better to do

California state senator Liz Figueroa (D-10, Milpitas, San Jose, So. Alameda cty.) is introducing legislation to block Google's new Gmail service, calling it "an invasion of privacy". Evidently the senator isn't familiar with the meaning of that phrase. Gmail will be a free service, supporting 10 gigabytes of email storage for users. It will be advertising supported. Just as Google posts targeted ads on its web search pages and supplies them to other web sites under the rubric "Ad Pages", so too will it target ads around the email contents. To do this the service will scan the contents for key words. Just like it does on search results or AdSense placements. And nothing is done without the consent of the user.

So any of the privacy nazis who are complaining so vociferously have a simple solution - don't subscribe to Gmail. No legislation needed. Please, senator Figueroa, get back to trying to balance the budget - something that will impact people's lives.

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