I mentioned Gmail a while back, and have there ever been privacy concerns about that… jeez. There’s a whole slew of somewhat alarmist pages out there attempting to scare folks away from this new service. Gmail-is-too-creepy.com alleges that Google may sell you email contents to the FBI. Well, in all honesty, I’d be disappointed if they did that, but at the same time, guys, it’s email. If it’s supposed to be private, print it out on a classy piece of paper and call a courier.

The funny thing is that there’s also a number of counter-sites out there that provide a second opinion on these issues. This is one aptly-named one.

One of the major issues that the anti-Google pages raise is the issue of how Google archives large portions of the Internet in the Google Cache. When my old wizardcode page went down for a few days, I was still able to get into about half the blogs through the Cache and save them. Blitz ended up recovering the DBs, but just the same, I felt a little better for being able to grab them like that. Now I could understand someone being frustrated that something they intentionally took offline could still be viewed that way, but it was their choice to not place norobots and noarchive in the header of their document. And always be careful before you put anything online. I guess that’s the moral of the story.

Mike

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