I’m off to a conference that I am soooo not prepared for. Where the hell does the time go?

Okay, so I don’t entirely hate my university. I just really, really dislike most of the people there most of the time (a few exceptions nothwithstanding). For the time being, I’ll spare my wonderful readers a lengthy monograph on why my academia sucks. However, I do want to highlight one particular incident that’s got me all worked up. Today’s theme: pretentious bastards. May I present as evidence for the proscecution, the following email sent to a collegue:

Dear Gmail user:
This message is automatically generated. As you may know, e-mail from
or to gmail.com is not private, but is data-mined to provide
advertising income for Google. The commercialization of private
correspondence, and the breach of privacy, should be resisted.
Therefore: 1) I encourage you to cancel your GMail account. 2) Please
do not write me from gmail.com. I do not reply to e-mail from
gmail.com except for this message. 3) Please use another e-mail provider so
that our correspondence may be private and not subject to
commercialization.

I can barely even begin explaining what is so wrong about this email. First, it is rude as f*ck!! This email is coming from a conference organizer (who is an arrogant prick to begin with), and he has the nerve to condescendingly moralize to his correspondents. What the hell?! Mind you, this isn’t some conference on computers, or technology or anything even moderately related to his pompous rant. Yet, our friend here knows so damn much about privacy, email, freedom, and licking his own ass that he feels no qualms whatsoever telling people what email provider they ought to use. No, not even what they ought to use. Rather, that you must use a different email account to correspond with him.

Who the hell do you think you are, f*cking-king-of-England?!

Oh, I’m sorry. You’re actually just an arrogrant grad student who gets off on spreading his bullshit propaganda through his official position of conference organizer. Talk about abuse of power. Even better is the fact that his moralizing is completely unfounded. At least, I think so. There are some folks out there who agree with him. However, I think there are some major flaws with their logic. Allow me to illustrate the two major problems as I see them.

First, this moron/jackass seems to be under the misunderstanding that any email is reasonably private. The truth is, there seems to be some ambiguity about the legal status of email. My understanding it that email is in the public domain. That is, once you send it, it can be resent, duplicated, distributed, etc. without the original author’s permission. So in that sense, email isn’t really private at all. If you send an obnoxious email to someone who then forwards it to a friend who then blogs about it, you’re just out of luck ;-) So the whole “breech of privacy” argument is a bit inflated. Now, it is illegal to intercept and read emails under current US Wiretap laws (see August 11, 2005). However, federal law only requires that one party be aware of and consent to content filtering in order for that to be considered legal. Secondly, it’s something that spam filters do all the time. They scan the content of all incoming email and act on it accordingly. Anti-gmail advocates say that while this process is “technically” the same, but “legally” different. I’m not really sure how that argument works, especially if the gripe against gmail is soley that “Gmail violates the privacy rights of non-subscribers. Non-subscribers who e-mail a Gmail user have ‘content extraction’ performed on their e-mail even though they have not consented to have their communications monitored, nor may they even be aware that their communications are being analyzed”*. If that’s truly the case against gmail, then there seems to be no difference at all between spam filtering and targeted advertising. Not to mention it’s not like someone is actually sitting there reading people’s gmail emails and deciding what ads to place. It’s automated, with computers filtering words, not evaluating and storing the intellectual content of emails.

The second problem is this claim about gmail somehow “commercializing” email. I can only assume that he thinks placing ads in email is wrong. If this is the case, then he must logically send out these snarky auto-replies to people who use yahoo, hotmail, msn, or just about any other free email provider, since they all incorporate ads into either the emails sent from their servers or at least into the user’s mail management pages. This means that really the only “good” emails come from people who 1) get email accounts from their universities or 2) pay for an internet service provider. In essence, unless he’s willing to lay down the capital for a truly free email service with no advertisments whatsoever, he’s essentially restricting his emails to only those people who can pay to keep it commercial-free. Forgive me for disagreeing and thinking that free webmail is a wonderful thing. Moreover, I think the price I pay (having google place small, unobtrusive, content-oriented ads on my emails) is pretty low if it means that I won’t get spam every single day, that my email is easily searchable, and that I get 2.5 gigabytes of free email space. My university email provider can’t offer that, and our servers are down at least once a quarter. (Hmm, speaking of ads, didn’t that just sound like a huge plug for gmail?*)

I’m seriously tempted to start sending emails to their “famous” speakers asking them to boycott because of this ridiculous crap. It would be interesting to see if this guy would really stand by his campaign against gmail if all his speakers started dropping out.

*This article is not a paid endorsement for gmail, although the author would gladly accept any contribution from google and/or its subsidiaries :-D

       
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