more privacy and g-mail

scott recently posted some interesting satire on this whole g-mail fiasco... a little announcement that the United States Postal Service will now be opening envelopes to provide targeted ads. This got me thinking, so I'll share the comment I posted to scott's entry:

When I first read scott's satirical announcement, my initial gut-reaction was off-putting... which lead me to investigate why. Upon reflecting, I feel that, rather than a reaction rooted in some latent google-philia, my discomfort comes from a fundamental disconnect between how e-mail works and how most folks conceptualize it.

Us computer scientists are so often used to thinking about these things in terms of their actual implementation. From a security (as opposed to privacy, whatever you mean by that) standpoint, all the mail carriers have capacity to do harm. We know that sending an e-mail is not like sending a sealed envelope. Focusing solely on mechanism, scott's analogy is only correct if the USPS also mandated that from now on people could only send postcards... no more envelopes! However, a small minority of informed users would start using ciphers which scramble the "publicly" visible contents of their postcards into gibberish that the postcard recipients could then decode.

Metaphorically, however, many if not most folks think of their electronic mail in terms of it's enveloped, physical counterpart. The real problem then, may not be that G-Mail does this or Hotmail does that, but that mechanism and metaphor are not mutually supporting.

Given a choice, I personally would uphold the metaphor over the mechanism. If people's expectation is that their private content remains private, perhaps it's time to consider ways to make the mechanism match up.

It's funny though, I was checking my mail on g-mail yesterday, and noticed two little adverts on the side of the page. Struck me at the time as so insignificant... but in light of the comments above it seems to me that if there is a problem here that is worthy of action, the illconceived yet well-intentioned efforts of Sen. Liz Figueroa and friends are attacking the symptoms rather than the source.