Leave google alone!

Google is in the process of introducing a concept in web-based email that will revolutionize the way we view web-based email. Google is offering a 1 Gigabyte storage free web-based email service. This is about 500 times as large as any of the other free email services.

Obviously there has to be a catch of some sort, and there is. The text of the email messages will be scanned so that google can deliver some targeted advertising. This will be a machine scan and no human will ever see it.

Is there a problem here? Obviously not, but some pseudo-civil liberties groups seem to have forgotten the definition of civil liberties.

A coalition of 28 privacy and civil liberties groups wrote Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page a letter Tuesday urging them to think again about the service, which they said sets potentially dangerous precedents for the automated scanning of private communications. The service may conflict with European privacy laws, and should be suspended until privacy issues are addressed, they wrote.

Of course, as these groups admit, email is already scanned on a regular basis in order to filter out spam. This is no different, as long as the email message (or parts thereof) are not seen by a human, there really is no violation of privacy. In fact, the spam filters are, if anything, a more egregious assault on privacy since the scan can result in some email messages getting censored, whereas the google ad-scan will never result in a message being blocked.

However... none of this really matters, because the google gigabyte mailservice is voluntary. If you think that your privacy rights are being trampled, don't get it, plain and simple. If you start pushing google to not offer the service to anyone, then you are essentially trampling on my own liberty to choose, and presumably that is something all good libertarians would want to avoid.