For your eyes only? Gmail doesn’t seem to think so.
Just because you typed in a password before accessing Gmail doesn’t mean you are the only one who reads your email.
It is a well-known fact that Gmail reads the contents of your email messages in order to determine which AdSense ads should be displayed.
Don’t believe me? Check this out.
I sent myself two nearly identical email messages. The only thing that changed between the two email messages was one sentence. Each email contained it’s own somewhat random and completely nonsensical sentence.
When I opened these emails using Gmail, the ads on the right-hand side of the page changed based on the content of that sentence.
Example 1:
The keyword that was picked up by Gmail in this example was “VOIP.” Three out of the five advertisements on the side of the page were for VOIP services.
Example 2:
I’m not 100% sure what word Gmail thought was important here, but I’m guessing it was the word “flower.” In this example, I got adds for flower delivery in Japan, flowers for sale, and floral design school.
(Another blogger even got an ad for Gingered Spam Salad paired with an email about spam filters.)
Google proponents often explain that targeted advertisements are there to benefit the user and that no human actively reads each email to determine which ads should be paired with it. However, having a machine scan through your email is still tantamount to an invasion of privacy.
One thing Gmail can’t do is read encrypted email messages. Webmail encryption used to be difficult to implement and even more cumbersome to use. Even today, there are a limited number of software choices for webmail encryption.
The most user-friendly choice is MailCloak which is about to be released as a preview edition. MailCloak is easy-to-install and easy-to-use, but don’t let that fool you. It’s a surprisingly powerful email encryption program that allows you to encrypt and decrypt webmail and regular email messages.
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