Email Services and Customer Privacy in Light of Googles Gmail Service :: Internet

Email Services and Customer Privacy in Light of Google's Gmail Service Introduction Should email customers opt to give up their private correspondences to corporations in return for the promise of more overall privacy, as well as other incentives? Or should corporations be prevented to use the contents of email for any purpose, imposed by a government data privacy law, whether consent is given or not? In the case of the US-based corporation, Google, with its Beta introduction of Gmail[1], a new free email service, a customer who signs up to Google's new email service and its Privacy Policy [2] and Terms of Use [3], also signs up to have their email's contents read by a computer and processed by Google. This effectively announces that they have no expectations of the privacy [4] of anything related to their email, even what is written to them by other parties. Which, in turn, allows for one's 4th Amemdment rights to be further diluted because the "criteria for determining that a search is constitutional is: if it does not violate a person's reasonable or legitimate expection of privacy." [4,7] Will Google's bold move start a wave of new uses of customer's "private" data that may further errode privacy by showing that our expectations of our personal mail, phone conversations, or other forms of communications, are public domain, or atleast free to bartar with in order to obtain other services? At what point can this spiral effect on our rights to privacy be reversed, if at all? Already, there have been complaints from Europe [1], where there exists stricter data protection policies than the US,due to many factors that include the events of September 11 as well as the stance on self regulation on privacy issues here in the US[5,6]. Atleast 31 organizations "have written a letter calling upon Google to suspend its Gmail service until the privacy issues are adequately addressed." [9]the Gmail Services and their Issues Here are some of Gmail's proposed services and some Pro's and Cons. First off, the service entices customers to join by providing one GigaByte of email storage. This gives customers a good reason to switch and then stay, but it also allows for the storing of other sensitive information other than text that may have future privacy issues [1]. Secondly, the data may be stored indefinitely, even after the user deletes it or terminates their account.