Wednesday, October 12, 2005

GMAIL: More Evil Than Satan?

While we're on the topic of Google....

A Google search of 'More Evil Than Satan' used to bring up Microsoft's homepage. I cannot confirm if this was a google-bomb or not (see my last post) but it did not work for very long.

However, in a strange turn of fate, shortly afterwards if you searched 'More Evil Than Satan' on MSN search, you guessed it, Google was the top result.

So, the point of my post is what makes Google and Microsoft More Evil Than Satan?

Well Microsoft is pretty obvious really: Million dollar corporation, buys and sells souls... I mean computer software.... everything is closed source, standardised, unstable and generally crap. We all have our opinion of Microsoft so I'll leave it there for them.

GOOGLE however... why would they be considered evil!?!?! Its just a friendly neighbourhood search engine, helping you with your uni work, helping you find ...uhh... images.... and not generally trying to buy your soul.

But on closer inspection it may be a different story...

Let me start with the number one EVIL Google spawn: GMAIL

You might all know that G-Mail is the latest and greatest free email account provider. It offers a huge amount of storage space (2gig last I looked) so you never have to delete your emails. In fact, it takes more clicks to delete an email than it does to archive one. Therefore you'd tend to keep most of your mail, taking advantage of the storage. You never know when you might need to find that hilarious fowarded email you recieved 3 years ago... you know.. the one with the frog.. ring a ding, bo bo, dee dee, etc... didnt that make you laugh?? Doesnt it make you want to kill yourself now that its NUMBER ONE ON THE FREAKIN MUSIC CHARTS??!!!??? Sorry, I digress..

The point is, GMAIL basically encourages you to keep all the emails you recieve/send and even those put in the trash can tend to hang around in their until you delete them.

In short: Google wants to know all about you.

Yes, it's a privacy issue. If the US government wanted to build a database of all those people who had keywords like "assasinate", "nuke", even "bomb" or "box-cutter" in their email accounts, Gmail would be the first place they would look.

GMAIL offers so much storage that it has potential to be one of the greatest consumer databases imaginable. Every account holder and person who emails a gmail account is under their watch. There are a number of examples of innappropriate ad-matching from Gmail users (see http://www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com/ ).



Well, thats Gmail in a nutshell. I realise many of you use Gmail and probably disagree with my points, that's cool. I also realise that my argument probably isn't very well fleshed out here but see http://www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com/ for more information.

And again I apologise if anyone else has posted about his previously, I haven't read all of the blog.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home