I can't help but feel paranoia when I type a mail using gmail. Have you noticed how the side bar on the right reflects something related to the subject of the mail. Sometimes this might be helpful, but if I really want to know more about the subject, I could always go to their search engine, yes?
I don't know if there's a way to turn this feature off. I feel my privacy is at stake. "stop reading my mails, you twerp, that is rude", I feel like yelling. But I guess gmail doesn't recognize voices, so that would be a waste. I was wondering if some others had the same experience? And do you mind it?
Thursday, November 10, 2005
Someone's watching
Posted by bumblebee at 5:26 AM
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4 comments:
GMAIL announced that they will scan mails (computerized and not manual) and provide advertisements based on your content. It is far better than other mail services (read: Yahoo) doing the same without letting us know.
For a while, (before Gmail) I was getting India related adv. in my yahoo mail and I was little proud(??) thinking Indian ads are popular even in USA. Then I realized about content based ads.
Even computer start discrimate people. Well atleast in their cases it is to provide us with "better" ads.
It boils down to a trade-off. How much intrusion you are willing to tolerate for the services/help you get.
It is no different than relatives. Is it? :)
You can deceive it by typing a subject that is different from the contents or other such combinations to see how the tool does...:).. Atleast, it will make u feel happy about the fact that the software couldnt guess u right...
Free "stuff" always has some form of implicit cost as we all know. In google's case, its a genuine search for key words. So, it may not be that bad after all...
One possible solution...I thought of it and tried it and it works reasonably well...
Basic idea is this. Insert a space between every other character so that your mail would read something like this...
" H i !, I j u s t b o u g h t a C a n o n C a m e r a !"
You can automate this by typing your mail using any editor and executing the following "perl" script. For those of you who are perl agnostic, it is a scripting language which is very useful to do text processing.
perl -00 -ne 's/([a-zA-Z0-9 ])/$1 /g;print $_;' < InputFileName
in the command-line prompt. This will do the trick of generating the file with the spaces. Now, google will not find any match to a word since the words are now just letters... Also, since we uniformly space it out (regular space will now be 2 spaces), it is fairly readable ! The Subject should also be typed the same way...
I guess whoever reads my mails will be really bored. So, maybe I dont care at all.
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