Just wrote this email to someone who was complaining about invasion of privacy. Its my twopence, but since I made the effort of wrting it in a email thought i'd post it. Its been on my mind for a while now.

Hey XYZ,
My cousin works for google and was waxing eloquent about how cool it is and
I commented that I hated the fact that my email was being read,, and he
retorted that no one was sitting there going through my personal stuff, it was
just a routine keyword search that gmail does. True or not is another debate
by itself, but as you pointed out its the general trend that the world is
moving towards, could you say its almost part of evolving ?

you can make a point and take a stance by stopping to use gmail. are u also
going to stop shopping online? Amazon tracks every purchase you make. Are u
going to stop using cell fones ? The fone company tracks every call you make
and there are probably people listening to your conversation ? Will you stop
talking ? You are profiled every time you go through customs and like it or
not that is also an invasion of privacy.

People complain a lot about invasion of privacy. But u see in this
hopelessly tech savvy world we have isolated humans soo much from each
other, that we have made this evil amost necessary. It starts off as part of the
state like defence and police, for only tracking wrongdoers, and then slowly seeps into every aspect of our
life, simply because money can be made off it. How and where do we say enough is enough ? In the not so tech savvy
world, say in a crowded community bonded place like India you have nosy
neighbours who keep track of every little thing you buy,do,and say. They
know accurately your dinner times and the time you like to have sex. It more
of a human need than anything else. Why else would reality TV sell ???

We are all, directly and indirectly, in one way or another endorsing this
intrusion. And have been for centuries and its irreversible. Unless we start
saying NO to a lot of things. But if I asked my boss why make a tuner to
support 4 TV broadcasts in the same house I would not get my next paycheck
!!! If we asked why do we need cableTV on a cell fone, a lot of people in
Qualcomm and TI won't get their paychecks. The answer is simply that we do
it because we can. We do it because we believe that a lot more good comes of
developing technology and so we just learn to live with the repercussions and
the rest.

Coming back to the original point that I started out to make :), XYZ,
Gmail is probably one of the least intrusive and offensive things around. Don't take such
things to heart :) Its way coooler than hotmail anyways :)

Ragini