-------- Original Message -------- Subject: FW: Opposition to your stance on Gmail [REMOVEEMAIL] Date: Tue, 4 May 2004 16:55:17 -0700 From: Ilya Haykinson To: 'Declan McCullagh' <declan@private> Declan, FYI - this is what I sent to EPIC. _____ From: Ilya Haykinson Sent: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 3:57 PM To: 'info@private'; 'rotenberg@private' Subject: Opposition to your stance on Gmail Hello, As a long-time supporter of privacy initiatives on the Internet, and a supporter of many organizations that speak out for privacy and freedom in the information age (I have supported the EFF and ACM for several years), I have always wanted to give my support to your organization for its outstanding work. However, with your recent stance on Gmail (and especially the letters to the CA state attorney general), I feel that you have crossed the line between privacy and anti-commercialism. In my opinion, the Gmail service is not any different than any other web mail service, with the exception that it is better and easier to use. The scanning of mail by computers is done by every anti-spam program. The retention of deleted mail in backups is done by every company offering email services. Advertising support of free email services is a feature of every commercial email service. I believe that the question about Gmail is _not_ a question for government regulation, or even industry uproar. It is a question for individuals - whether to use the service or not. The privacy policy and all the related information on that site clearly states exactly what Google is planning to do with the emails you get. I think that your organization has become misguided in its quest to preserve privacy on the Internet. Instead of Google, your organization should be lobbying the attorney general to do something about spyware that is often advertising in misleading ways, contains marginally-truthful privacy policy if it even has one at all, and is completely impossible to remove from a computer system. Your organization needs to lobby governments of countries that proxy data, scanning for offensive keywords and then persecuting people exercising their freedom of speech. Your organization needs to pursue "opt-out" spammers with no return addresses. By pursuing Google, you are implicitly not pursuing these true privacy violations as much as you could have. And for that, you would not be able to gain my or any of my acquaintances' support. Sincerely, -ilya haykinson _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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