Gmail outlawed?: The BBC reports today that a California legislator is proposing a state law, aimed at Gmail, which would outlaw the reading, by any person or computer, of another person's electronic mail. For a variety of reasons, this bill is pretty unlikely to pass, but in true law-student fashion, here are my thoughts on why I'm not so concerned about Gmail's privacy implications:

First, Google is being explicit in their privacy policy about the fact that a computer monitors my emails for content and serves ads. Hotmail and Yahoo might do the same thing, or might monitor without serving related ads, but they don't tell me. Their privacy policies do not preclude them doing this, even if they don't address it explicitly. Google's policy explicitly says that they do monitor, but that they do not record records for what ads are served to me, or what keywords are found in my messaages. They only give aggregate results to advertisers ("Your ad was served 10,000 times.") which is the same as what every other webmail service does.

Second, the California legislation -- even if it were a good idea, which I doubt -- would be overbroad. Everyone has, and wants, spam filters or computers which filter your email into different folders, or whatever. Although these are not captured by the legislation's intent, they certainly would be covered since they do exactly the same thing (check an email for keywords and take action if those keywords are found).

Finally, there is no need for legislation here. The media has done an outstanding job in this instance of serving as a consumer watchdog, identifying a product -- before it is even released! -- with privacy concerns and bringing those issues to the public's attention. This is the way it is "supposed to work." Legislatures shouldn't prohibit the existence of systems like Gmail because, if I am concerned about what is being discussed by the media, then I will simply choose not to use Gmail. If I am not concerned, I will use it. The reason that I, personally, choose to use it is because I am insufficiently concerned about these issues -- although generally I am very concerned about privacy, I judge that the risks to me are low in this particular situation. There is no larger public evil which people are unaware of if they let Google scan their email for keywords.

For me, the reason that I choose to disregard the potential privacy implications is because, first of all, I trust Google (which, of course, could change if Google were bought out by a company I don't trust) and I don't have any particular private information that I talk about in my email. (If I did, I should not use Gmail, or Hotmail, or Yahoo, or any email service. In fact, I probably should not use email at all.) Gmail represents, for me, a new way of using email. The interface is clean and easy to use, and it makes a lot of my email tasks easier. I was surprised at how quickly I picked up the "Gmail" email schema and how, after a day of using it, I'm already "emailing differently."

Incidentally, I was also surprised at how few ads I've seen -- I probably only see them on a few occasions, maybe one message in six, in messages which explicitly relate to a given topic (one email was about the movie The Passion; another which had the word "sorry" in it gave me ads about being "sorry"). It doesn't seem that Gmail is set up to "figure out what I am talking about" and serve ads based on that -- it's solely a keyword-based thing. And as compared to the absolutely horrendous blinking ads with soundtracks that I get on Hotmaill, I don't really notice the Gmail ads, except when I choose to look at them.

UPDATE: More from the Volokh Conspiracy. Interesting counterargument from Steven Wu at LawMeme.