Ethics of Google's Gmail

Google has always been an innovative company on the leading edge of Internet technology. Known for its powerful, widely-used search engine, the company also branches into other areas, including scholarly research, maps, and web logs, or blogs. In April of 2004, riding upon the success of its search engine, Google went public—a small resurgence of the tech bubble. Earlier that same month, the soon-to-be corporation began testing of a new email system it dubbed Gmail.
By creating Gmail, Google announced its intention to enter a market already staked out by giants such as Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail. Google’s plan was to provide free email, just as these two Internet giants were already doing. However, Gmail at the time of its release exceeded Yahoo!’s and Microsoft’s capabilities in many ways. In April 2004, Hotmail offered its users two megabytes of email storage and Yahoo! Mail offered four megabytes (Festa). Gmail as a service was born offering one gigabyte of storage. This capacity, 250 times that of Yahoo and 500 times that of Microsoft, was staggering. One gigabyte of storage meant pictures and even music files could be emailed and saved without the necessity for deletion. Indeed, the typical email user would never have to throw away a text email again. Gmail also harnessed Google’s search engine power to allow its users email search capability. Gmail combined capacity with the ability to search, giving its users both the means and the reason to save their emails indefinitely. For all of these reasons, Google’s new product was hard to resist for many consumers. Because of its superiority in the field, customers were guaranteed. Gmail could afford to employ risky practices even if they drove away some users. A firm base would be in place regardless, lured by storage and search capabilities.
Google continued to innovate, therefore, but this time from the business end. The company’s new email storage promises did not come cheaply, and Google decided to apply its targeted advertising technique to its new email service. For years, Google’s search engine had been generating advertisement revenue from “targeted advertising.” As an example, if a user searches for “water,” he or she is directed to a page with two columns of information. The left-hand column has search results—in other words, popular sites with the word “water” in a prominent position. The right-hand column has seven targeted advertising links: one is for spring water, another is for music called “Water,” and a third is for consultants for the environmental movement (water – Google Search). These advertisements are tailored to the search term – in this case, water – and so are theoretically more attractive to the average consumer.
Applied to email, the concept of targeted advertising becomes more complicated and more invasive. A computer managed by Google scans incoming and outgoing mail. When this mail is opened by a Gmail user, targeted advertisements based on the contents of the email appear next to the text of the email. Advertisements, however, will not be displayed if the email contains “catastrophic news” (Google’s Privacy Policy). An email about a death in the family would fall into this category. Gmail therefore scans emails for advertising purposes. It also scans to gauge the emotional scale of the email.
The fact that Gmail scans its users’ incoming and outgoing electronic messages presents an ethical dilemma and raises many questions. Is targeted advertising ethical? Is the system open to abuse? Has Google descended to the level of mind-reading to increase sales of advertisers’ products? If these concerns are serious, and if Gmail and its advertising process is deemed unethical, there is a recourse and a final, ultimate question. Should a legislature, either at the state or federal level, outlaw targeted advertising in email?
Google’s new email service, Gmail, indeed almost immediately attracted a lot of criticism. Largely, this criticism came from privacy advocates and related advocacy groups that cited two integral components of Gmail as threats to privacy. First, the massive amount of storage space (1 GB per user in April 2004, recently increased to 2 GB), coupled with the impossibility of completely erasing messages:
The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the service. Indeed, residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account. (Google’s Privacy Policy)
established a system where entire histories of personal electronic correspondence, confidential or not, were stored on remote servers. Such a portfolio of communications allows for easy profiling of users because our emails contain personal conversations about subjects that interest our correspondents and us, confirmations of purchases and subscriptions to goods and services that we prefer and newsletters or other types of mass mailings from organizations in which we are active.
Currently, Google has stated that it does not intend to assemble such profiles. However, privacy advocates argue, this may easily change now that Google is a publicly traded corporation and profit-maximizing interests of investors supersede any personal visions that Mr. Brin or Mr. Page, co-founders of Google, may hold. As an FAQ on the website of one of such advocacy groups states, “Although Google currently says that they will not record the "concepts" extracted from scanned e-mails, they could decide to do so in the future and thereby create detailed profiles of users.” (Gmail Privacy FAQ).
The other main concern, which is the crux of the debate and this case study, is the mechanism that Gmail employs to present targeted advertising to users. As mentioned above, Gmail uses an automatic vocabulary scanner to “read” the contents of the email and present sidebar advertising on the same topic. Although the economic benefits for Google here are enormous, the privacy community has jumped on this as the hot-button issue of the entire movement. The fact that this technology is fully automated and people do not read these emails does not change the fact that all incoming and outgoing correspondence is being analyzed by a third-party.
This presents several privacy-threatening scenarios. Email scanning technology is a dangerous Pandora’s Box, and, having opened it, there’s no limit or, some will say, opportunity to close it. Even if no Google employee will ever see the email, developments in the field of AI and information selling (name banks, etc.) means that invasion of privacy is not limited to nosy humans. In the end, the reason why we keep information to ourselves and would prefer not to share it is not the fear of someone else knowing but the fear of what may happen to us as a result of them knowing. Phrased in such a way, our fear no longer inherently relies on specifically human interception of our correspondence.
Of course, there is still the very likely possibility that humans will read Gmail users’ mail anyway. Currently, language filters can be ineffective because of homonyms. For example, the word “Polish” can bring up ads for Berlitz language classes or automobile paint polish. (Hansell). Expanding opportunities for technology outsourcing may mean that training such a tool with the help of human scanners, akin to training your speech-to-text program by reading sample sentences to it, maybe a very cost-effective possibility.
The final, and perhaps most dangerous, scenario involves our privacy in re government. Currently, obtaining our emails requires the government to get a subpoena and thus to demonstrate probable cause to a judge. However, the law is at best ambiguous when it comes to banks of information and word usage histograms (i.e. data on which words are used in your emails and how frequently). The information that the government may obtain from this data can be as useful to them (and as dangerous to the user) as the text of the actual email yet the burden of proof on the government to gain access to it is much lower. Hence, in case a Gmail user is investigated by a government agency, he has much less constitutional protection and right to due process in relation to his electronic correspondence compared to a user of another email system. (Dixon) For example, if the FBI wanted to review someone’s correspondence but did not have probable cause with which to go a judge, they could still get permission to view the histogram records. Although this has not happened yet, it is not unlikely to suggest that such records could later be used as that very probable cause which would get FBI their search warrant.
Armed with these arguments, opponents of Gmail began a powerful campaign against the service almost immediately after it debuted in April 2004. By the end of the month, a bill in the California Senate threatened to ban this type of technology. The bill did not mention Gmail, but the specificity of some of the wording could have put California in violation of the Bill of Attainder clause of the U.S. Constitution had it passed. Privacy websites pleaded for Google to shut down Gmail and advised users to stay away from Gmail. New websites, such as www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com sprung up. The latter website addressed yet another privacy concern. Although Gmail users give explicit consent to Google’s privacy policy, their correspondents do not. A user of Virginia web mail, for example, who responds to a friend’s Gmail-originating message, will have his email scanned without ever giving explicit consent or being presented with a disclaimer that this will happen. Conscious of this, the aforementioned website offered a pre-written text to send as a reply to messages from Gmail users, “Dear Gmail user: Due to privacy considerations, we cannot respond unless you resend your email from a different account. For more information, please visit www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com” (Creepy Gmail)
This torrent of criticism caught Google by surprise. They anticipated that their new service would make headlines, but they assumed those headlines positive. After all, Gmail cost as much as Microsoft’s Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and other free online mail services, but provided hundred times more storage space, enhanced ease-of-use, spam filtering, ability to search old emails using Google’s immensely popular search technology, etc. Google was prepared to aggressively promote their new service at the expense of big-name competitors, not defend it from non-for-profit privacy groups.
Initially, Google had no response to these critics, who even used Gmail’s advantages against it, claiming that privacy concerns are even more pressing in light of the service’s superior features with which it can gain market power. Larry Page only made matters worse when he replied to a question about possibly further email scanning and content analysis with, “It might be really useful for us to know that information. I'd hate to rule anything like that out" (Gaither). However, even before Google was able to regroup and address this criticism, many technology experts and writers began to defend the service.
Many argue that the various scenarios privacy advocates present are “slippery slope” arguments. Of course, the possibility of abuse is potentially there, but assuming that Google will take advantage of its customers in every possible way to maximize profits, even if this means compromising ethical principles, goes against the track record of the company. The “do no evil” motto is strong in Mountain View, CA. Google’s treatment of its employees, the extremely organized, and widely viewed as fair, way by which Google went public, make some present it as the ethical, socially-responsible antithesis to the high-tech giant Microsoft. Taking past performance into account, it seems unreasonable to suspect that Gmail will devolve along the path mentioned above. Critics respond, however, citing the danger of using “past performance” to predict future developments. It is looked down upon in investment firms and can be just as misleading in cases like this.
The other defense lies primarily along comparative lines. It is best expressed by Leslie Walker of the Washington Post, who writes,
In some key technological aspects, Gmail works no differently from those other sites. All these Web-mail options demand that you trust a distant site to store and send your e-mail reliably. None lets you peer behind the scenes to verify that they're doing what they promised with your e-mail. Brin noted that Gmail's scanning system isn't that technically different from the message-scanning that most other Web-mail services undertake to detect viruses and filter spam. (Walker)
In essence, Gmail is nothing new. All of our emails go through some other server before they land on our computer. Theoretically, anyone who has administrative control over that server can read your email, unless you use special (and high-priced) encryption technology. This “someone” doesn’t even have to be your ISP. An email message may land on countless third-party servers of the Gemini broadband network before it reaches your ISP’s server. You have never consented to their privacy policies, may not even be aware of them, and yet, theoretically, they can view your email. Privacy advocates note differences between the situations. These other companies do not collect information, analyze it, and store for future use. Their founders have not publicly stated that any and all information can be useful. Also, Gmail re-scans emails to seed them with new ads every time a user opens that message. This is “fundamentally different than removing harmful viruses and unwanted spam” – the purposes of ISP email scanning. (Dixon et al)
Finally, Gmail’s targeted advertising technology is defended the same way globalization often is: It is the trend. It would be virtually impossible to reverse the trend. So deal with it! Ms. Walker’s statement, “the reality seems to be that targeted advertising is well on its way to becoming an important part of the Internet economy, helping defray the cost of online content and services,”(Walker) is similar to Tom Friedman’s assertion that globalization permeated our economy to such a degree and brought so much to it that reversing the trend is impossible (Friedman). In fact, Gmail probably would not exist without this targeted advertising technology because a targeted approach brings Google’ much more ad revenue and offsets the cost of maintaining such large amounts of storage space for Gmail users.
In essence, this debate comes down to several key points:
1. Defining privacy rights
2. Deciding whether past performance of “do no evil” can be trusted as an indicator of Google’s future actions
3. Evaluating the seriousness of the presented privacy threat scenarios and the possibility of them happening i.e. scenario analysis
4. Comparing and contrasting Gmail with existing, accepted technologies
5. Agreeing on who should be responsible for doing the above cost-benefit analysis
a. each Gmail user and their correspondent
b. Google itself, or
c. a legislative body
The ethical dilemma here is multifaceted and only approaching it from a systematized perspective (as shown above) will allow for a constructive discussion and a decision on the matter.

Works Cited

Creepy Gmail. 31 Oct. 2005 .
Dixon, Givens, Corker et al "An Open Letter to Google Regarding Its Proposed Gmail Service." 6 Apr. 2004.
Festa, Paul. “Google to offer gigabyte of free email | CNET News.com.” CNET News 1 Apr. 2004. 31 October 2005 .
Gaither, Chris. "Google's E-Mail Strategy Criticized; New Gmail service scans messages and attaches targeted ads to them, raising privacy fears." Los Angeles Times 2 Apr. 2004, Home ed., sec. C: 1. ProQuest. ProQuest Newspapers. 31 Oct. 2005. Path: Los Angeles Times; April 2, 2004; Google\'s E-Mail Strategy...
"Gmail Privacy FAQ." 18 Aug. 2004. Electronic Privacy Information Center. 31 Oct. 2005 .
"Google's Privacy Policy." Google Privacy Center. 14 Oct. 2005. Google, Inc. 31 Oct. 2005 .
Hansell, Saul. "Google e-mail wrestles with ads and ambiguities." The New York Times 22 June 2004, sec. F: 16. Lexis Nexis. Academic. 31 Oct. 2005. Keyword: Gmail.
Orlowski, Andrew. "Google mail is evil – privacy advocates." The Register 3 Apr. 2004. 31 Oct. 2005 .
Walker, Leslie. "Gmail Leads Way in Making Ads Relevant." Editorial. The Washington Post 13 May 2004, Final ed., sec. E: 01.
“Water – Google Search.” 31 Oct. 2005 .