Now that the initial furore has died down a bit and the price of invites has crashed, SecurityFocus' Mark Rasch (scary photo, Mark!) writes a well-argued piece on The Trouble with Gmail. Just in case you're thinking he's another paranoid nutcase or rabid civil libertarian take note of the fact that he's *actually* a former head of the Justice Department's computer crime unit...
"Even though the configuration of the Gmail service minimizes the intrusion into privacy, it represents a disturbing conceptual paradigm - the idea that computer analysis of communications is not a search. This is a dangerous legal precedent which both law enforcement and intelligence agencies will undoubtedly seize upon and extend, to the detriment of our privacy."
Maybe the (conceptual) horse has already bolted - it certainly seems that the competition thinks so, as they fall over themselves to up the storage capacities of their e-mail accounts. Some more successfully than others, of course :)
What interests me in all this, however, is the fact that to many people - especially those who couldn't give a monkeys about PCs - e-mail is the internet, and by giving someone the capacity to store, manage, search, etc. ALL of their digital communications and relationships these companies are effectively now doling out potentially lifelong digital identities.
Did this (potential) add value beyond the mere scarcity of the first Gmail accounts - who knows (what price phil@gmail.com)?
Is it going to create / enable / invite a whole new raft of derivative services - probably (consider Pop Goes the Gmail just for starters)!
Is this the beginning of a shift from Personal Computing to Personal Information (Personal Servers, Mobile Gateways, convergence through synch, etc.)?
You decide.
UPDATED 21/6/04: Irdial Discs points to another couple of Gmail 'tools': Gmail Loader, which allows you to upload existing mail archives to Gmail (to utilise its search facilities); and a rather bizarre Gmail giveaway site, who seem rather proud to have accumulated over 44 million page views but who carry no ads...
Posted by lankyphil at June 16, 2004 11:41 PM | TrackBack