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Gmail Wigs Me Out
Posted by tgirsch

I’m thinking about ditching my Gmail account. It’s gotten to be too big brother for me. What bugs me is the “sponsored link” line at the top, where it targets ads and news links based on the contents of my e-mail messages. My sister sent me an e-mail with pictures of Jack-O-Lanterns she carved, and Gmail happily put up a link for Halloween decorations. A Saab dealer sent me an e-mail follow-up to a test drive my wife did some months ago, and a SAAB link shows up there. But the last straw was today, when I got an e-mail from Say Uncle, and Gmail conveniently gave me a link to a news story about a shooting somewhere. That’s just too damn wiggy for me.

Has anyone else had this experience?

The more time passes, the more I miss the good old days of POP3.

October 26th, 2007 Technology, How Capitalism Will Ruin You | 11 comments

11 Comments »

  1. SayUncle writes:

    I dunno. I seem to have natural blindness to ads. It’s uncanny that I never see them.

    Comment 10/26/2007

  2. tgirsch writes:

    This appears as a single line, right above the “Report Spam” button.

    Comment 10/26/2007

  3. Guav writes:

    I think you can go into your settings and get rid of that, under “Web Clips.”

    Comment 10/26/2007

  4. jeffry r. johnston writes:

    Guav is right

    Comment 10/26/2007

  5. tgirsch writes:

    Glad there’s a way to turn it off, but still. It opens your eyes to just how much you’re trusting someone when you go with a web-based e-mail client.

    Comment 10/27/2007

  6. Stormy Dragon writes:

    Wait, you mean that Google isn’t spending huge amounts of money providing free e-mail to people just to get a warm fuzzy feeling? *GASP*

    Comment 10/28/2007

  7. SayUncle » I know me and Google have issues writes:

    […] But seriously? […]

    Pingback 10/29/2007

  8. Nomen Nescio writes:

    google started out with the motto “don’t be evil”, but that only worked so long as they were still a small (in number of employees) company. as they grew to a big company, the same thing happened to them as happens to every company that grows beyond a certain size, and by now their motto has effectively been extended: “…to google.”

    i don’t mind using third parties for my email, but i will insist on downloading it to my own harddisk. IMAP or POP3, none of this read-it-on-the-web nonsense, not unless *i* control the web server.

    Comment 10/29/2007

  9. Manish writes:

    If your email goes through the internets, someone can read if they so choose. This holds for google, yahoo, POP3 providers, your own custom domain everyone, etc. Having said that, I love my gmail account..its the only web-based email that I’ve ever really enjoyed using over a POP3 client and am willing to deal with the advertising.

    Comment 10/29/2007

  10. Nomen Nescio writes:

    er, pretty much all email goes over the internet these days… even if you don’t read it with POP3 or IMAP, it’ll be delivered to the server using plain-text SMTP. real privacy’s only really possible if you habitually use strong encryption (PGP, GPG) and convince everybody you get email from to do likewise.

    short of that, SSL can help. read your webmail over HTTPS, and make sure your POP3/IMAP connections get encrypted using the SSL-enabled varieties of those protocols. (that last can be tricky, though.) it’s not foolproof of course, but it can make things so that hacking your computer with a virus or trojan and spying on you that way gets to be easier than just snooping your network traffic.

    Comment 10/29/2007

  11. Ravenwood writes:

    Gmail is for suckers. A good hosting provider also provides email and anti-spam utilities.

    Comment 10/29/2007

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