Sysadmin Field Notes

May 27, 2004

Hey, check out the improvements they've made to the originally silly bill introduced in reponse to initial reports of what gmail would provide. The first version completely missed the point, but the latest version actually makes sense. The blll was actually improved and made useful in committee; who'da thunk? It explicitly makes it legal to scan email to display advertisements in online services (which was the non-scary part of gmail), while making it illegal to retain that information to build a profile of the user (the decidedly scary, mostly unaddressed implication of gmail).

Funny to see them get something right for a change.

Update: Humm...you know what the bill doesn't seem to cover? You're not allowed to retain any personal information gleaned from the private communication, but it allows to you display contextual ads based on the content. Okay, but it doesn't keep you from retaining the history of ads display to the person does it? Since the ads are contextual, retaining that history still allows you to build a profile...example: Jimmy gets a bunch of email about bass fishing from his friend, so he gets served up bigfish.com and fishradar.com ads while checking his Google mail. Google can't remember that Jimmy got a bunch of bass fishing email, but I don't see that they are explicitly prohibited from remembering that they served him 4 adds for bigfish.com and 10 for fishradar.com. That makes it pretty easy to build a profile that says "Jimmy's a fisher;" really it seems like about the same amount of information leakage as just retaining the context info from the email....