G-mail and privacy

While searching on-line for some Christmas gifts, I came upon this article about the interaction between g-mail and privacy . I've always been intrigued by how little thought people put into how their personal data is used. Indeed, if monetizing information, and "mash-ups" involving your customer's data and your vendor's products, are in fact the future, the future is going to be bright for lawyers. For starters, look at the privacy policy Google has had to create in order to basically have no responsibility for how they use data they collect from customers. This policy is a great example of how companies task their lawyers to ensure customers have no rights in their data once it is transmitted to the company's servers. As I've noted in my column for the WHIR, I believe its only a matter of time before some over zealous company "over monatizes" the information it has received from its customers. When that happens, privacy policies, like Google's, will either need to be substantially modified, or will be found to be egregious. Until that time, I think web hosts should put considerable thought into how much they actually gain when leveraging their customer's information by sharing it with vendors and affiliates.

I'll leave for another day the question of how a Google search for "noise cancelling earphones" got linked to an analysis of G-mail and Google's privacy policy.