[ale] What's so special about gmail invites?

[George Carless]

> Er, I wasn't complaining, I was just trying to point out that filtering
> mail based on the gmail.com domain is, for all practical purposes,
> pointless.  Robert Reese's initial comment about gmail seemed, to me, to
> be a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived invasion of privacy.  I would
> argue that one should not expect *any* privacy or security with regards
> to email in the absence of encryption.  There is nothing that prevents
> an unscrupulous person from storing all email sent through a server
> under his/her control (whether that control is legitimate or the result
> of a breakin is irrelevant).  This same person could run any number of
> programmatical analyses and/or build profiles based on captured email.
> 
> Maybe we should be able to have a resonable expectation of privacy with
> regards to email, but the reality is that the current infrastructure
> does not allow it.

<rant>
Hear hear.  I find it ridiculous when people moan about gmail -- it is *absolutely*
a knee-jerk reaction.  GMail provide a service, for free, and detail up-front what
their intentions are with regards to scanning e-mail etc. -- and yet people still 
attribute malicious intent.  It's hardly as though anybody is forcing anybody else 
to use gmail; given that, I'm astonished that people moan and act as though google 
were some stalinesque organization setting about to invate people's privacy.  
Frankly, I think it's quite a stupid response.

The internet is inherently insecure and inherently non-private.  Either deal 
with it, don't use it, or do something about it.  But all of the fuss about Gmail is 
just daft - to speak in no uncertain terms, I find it technophobic nonsense that's 
often espoused by those who don't understand the technology and who worry about 
those who are open about what they're doing rather than those who keep quiet and may 
be silently doing any number of things with your data.  It's the same mindset that 
worries about secure credit card transactions online while thinking nothing of 
handing a credit card to a waitron they've never before met, and, well, that thinks 
that closed source code is more secure than open source code because with open 
source code you can see what's going on under the hood.
</rant>

--George 
--------------------------------------
George Carless ... kafka at antichri.st
Words are just dust in deserts of sound