Compliance Toolkit
Story: Big Brother turns its eye to Gmail
Posted by: Jon (Tuesday 22 June 2004, 12:37 PM)
Simon Davies is right to challenge this. While GMail is correct that a human is not reading the e-mail, the move nevertheless helps us further down the road of automated scanning that a number of people believe is a threat to their privacy. If GMail were to expand their policy to detecting criminal activity (and in the US right now they would likely be actively encouraged: there's a war on terrorism, don't you know?) then certain keyword combinations could well be helpfully notified to the authorities.
This is not wild paranoia. Recently a tribute band member in the UK, who innocently referred to a "gun" and a "jet airliner" in a text message, was arrested as he was leaving work (www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/03/text_punk/).
It is bad enough that e-mail is routinely scanned by surveillance powers (rather than being selected individually for scanning after a court order is obtained); we don't want private firms getting in on the act too.
Your earlier correspondent Shaun may not feel that GMail is a threat to his freedom. Accordingly, he is welcome to use the service if he wants to; privacy is a relative and very individual measure. However I won't be using the service, nor will I be e-mailing anyone who contacts me on it, either.
We have the technology available now to encrypt all of our e-mail communications. I think it is time we started doing this en masse, rather than leaving the door open for increasingly invasive automated processes to scan our messages for meaning and context. It is worth noting that it might be only five or ten years before machines can 'understand' written language completely, which further underscores the need for a basic level of encryption.
That all said, with Home Secretary David 'Big' Blunkett still pushing his authoritarian utopias (ID card, population database, biometrics, dismantling of trial by jury, on-the-spot fines etc) I think GMail will have some stiff competition for the Big Brother awards this year.
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