Singing Loudly

Would the way that Google's GMail makes money be an invasion of privacy? From what I understand, to get targeted ads the service would scan the contents of your email for keywords (much like blogger) and then place ads. I doubt this constitutes and invasion of privacy for a few reasons.

First, this is a voluntary service that outlines what it does. By signing the user agreement you are acknowledging that Google will scan your emails. If you aren't alright with this then you can go to hotmail or yahoo where the ads are more static.

Second, it it a computer based system that looks for keywords. I am not aware of any plans for human beings to ever peruse over your email to find keywords or for some other nefarious plan. Therefore, I doubt there is any real danger with the scanning itself.

Senator Liz Figuereoa says that it is advertisers rather than customers who wanted targeted ads. I think that I disagree. With the ad on blogger I find myself more interested in what those are than in the "find the perfect single" ads I see when getting my email.

Maybe my privacy sensitivity is low, but I'm just not seeing anything to cause much concern with GMail.