http://news.com.com/2010-1032-5187543.html?tag=nefd.acpro Is Google the future of e-mail? April 12, 2004, 4:00 AM PT By Declan McCullagh Google is hoping to convince us to use its forthcoming Gmail service for our lifetime e-mail needs. Once signed up to the Gmail system, every user gets a gigabyte of free Web-based e-mail storage. That's about 100 times the number of bits Microsoft's Hotmail accounts can hold. It's a generous offer. But should we take Google up on it? Right now, people who use Web-based e-mail can't squeeze that much in the cramped 4 megabytes or so that Google's competitors offer their nonpaying subscribers. What that means is that the impact of a security breach or privacy incident is sharply limited; your entire online life wouldn't be on public display in the case of one. With Gmail, on the other hand, you might have 20 years' worth of correspondence protected only by the thin shield of a password. My concern is not about Google's management, who have been upstanding corporate citizens. They've maintained a firewall between advertising and search results, and have resisted the temptation to follow Yahoo's "paid inclusion" lead. Google has stood up to censorship and, in general, has alerted its readers when it's legally required to yank sites from its index. Still, there are good reasons to be leery of Gmail, which requires you to trust the security of a computer system over which you have no control. If you keep your correspondence on your home computer, you can encrypt your old e-mail or squirrel it away on CD-ROMs that won't be accessible to a malicious hacker. That won't work, if everything's online. [...remainder snipped...] _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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