It seems that Gmail, my new favorite email service, is coming under fire because of privacy concerns. One California state legislator (and I've heard it's being talked about here in Massachusetts too) is trying to introduce a bill that would essentially ban it in the state of California.

The problem is that Gmail scans all of your incoming and outgoing messages for key terms that it then uses to target advertising to you. You explicitly agree that it's OK with you to have your outgoing emails scanned when you sign up (I was very aware of this provision when I signed up), but the problem apparently is with all the incoming messages. The proposed California law would not allow an email provider to scan messages unless they had the explicit permission of both parties--sender and receiver. That can probably never be done (unless it's a Gmail-to-Gmail message).

I think this is a lousy law. First of all, it's not like it's a person who does the scanning. A computer reads your emails, not for content, but for key terms, and then automatically places ads on (incidentally, I don't see any ads anywhere on my gmail account--that might be because they're still in beta-testing form, and the ads will come when it's released to the general public). Even though, theoretically, a person could probably go to the computer to find out what you wrote to me, I don't think a computer knowing what you wrote is that big an invasion of privacy.

Second, we all know that email is terribly insecure. You don't write sensitive secrets via email--it's easily hacked and intercepted.

Third, such a law would be hard to enforce. What are the jurisdictional requirements of the California state law? Does one of the parties have to be in California when writing or receiving the email? Both? What if I'm a California resident who's using Gmail on vacation in Wisconsin? Does the fact that Gmail routes your emails through servers located in California count? It's all very messy.

Finally, Gmail is a fabulous innovation. It makes several improvements upon past generations of web-based email, and I don't like the idea of it being stifled. Yahoo! Mail bases its advertising on demographic characteristics you tell them in your profile. A few years ago, I noticed that most of the ads on my Yahoo! Mail were for Maxim magazine and other such smut. I wrote them to complain that I don't like smut around my inbox, and they said that the ads were targeted to me because I was a male between 20-25 years old (at the time), and those ads are designed to appeal to me. I decided that if I couldn't change the ads, then I would change who Yahoo! thinks I am. I went into my profile to make myself an old man who doesn't get his kicks off of soft p*rn. But I couldn't change my age once I had entered it. I could, however, change my gender. So I did. Since then, my Yahoo! Mail has been covered with ads for diet programs (which still feature alluring pictures of women's bodies, but at least it's in a non-sexual context). All this is to say that Yahoo! Mail does a terrible job of figuring out what kind of ads appeal to me (and what kind of ads offend me!). Gmail's idea is better--not just because of the method of choosing ad content, but also because all Google ads are text-only and thereby easy to ignore. Let them do it.