Google Responds to Gmail Privacy Concerns

Google Responds to Gmail Privacy Concerns: "Google's newly announced free e-mail offering has strengthened its position against Yahoo! and MSN. Before it can continue to battle its competition in earnest, however, it's working to quell privacy concerns.
The company's plans to include contextually targeted ads in its Web e-mail client are the cause for the concern, because Google intends to have its technology scan the content of e-mail messages, and target ads accordingly. Now that it's clear the initiative isn't an April Fool's joke, analysts, industry figures and individuals are debating the decision across the Net. Meanwhile a group of privacy advocates are drafting a letter asking Google to clarify its policies...

In response, Google says what's drawing concern is what computers are capable of doing, not what the company does in reality. "We pride ourselves in protecting users' data and holding ourselves to he highest standard," said Wayne Rosing, VP of engineering for Google.

"We do not keep that data in correlated form, it's separated in various ways and we have policies inside the company that do not allow that kind of correlation to happen. We consider any program or programming that correlates user data with user identity to be a violation of trust and we do not do that," said Rosing.

But Rosing stopped short of saying that the company will never correlate the data.

"Then it gets to be an issue of what happens if we have to do something to comply with a legal situation," he said, apparently speaking of criminal cases in which the company might be subpoenaed by law enforcement.

It's worth mentioning that Google already has the power to correlate IP addresses and search queries and clicks -- something Rosing says has never occurred.

"I have been here a long time and I have no knowledge of that kind of situation [correlation] ever happening. It does not happen and every employee of Google knows they cannot do this. We have extensive monitoring of our people," Rosing said.

"We have very strict policies. We do not associate search clicks with a user's name or anything like that. And in certain cases we age data and it disappears from the system to provide enhanced privacy protection," Rosing said.

Rosing also pointed out that when computers filter spam, "they have to look at the e-mail in detail or they can't find the spam. It's nothing extraordinary or new going on here."