For president, we will choose from among (in the words of a reader) "a bumbling actor, a murderous cop, a very sick lawyer, a religious bigot, and an incoherent midget." Not a very good field to choose from.


-from Neal H. Cruz' "As I See It" column in the Inquirer, dated May 7, 2004

I would like to bring a topic of great interest not related to the election atmosphere in the Philippines. Recently, the search engine Google went public in the US stock market (its IPO is supposedly $2.7 billion!), thus signifying the beginning of the end of the Internet bubble crash. Also, Google announced plans for a new e-mail service, dubbed Gmail (you can check it out at gmail.com). What sets it apart from the rest is that Gmail will provide each user with 1 gigabyte of free storage (that's 250 times the 4MB storage in Yahoo! Mail and 10 times Hotmail's 100 MB "super-user" subscription package!). It all seems great, but there's a catch: Gmail will scan the content of your incoming messages and serve content-targeted ads alongside them. Huh? Doesn't that seem to be a creepy form of invasion of privacy? As if they were trying to "interrogate" us or put on surveillance? Judging by the reaction of lots of people, Google might as well have asked for everyone's ATM passwords. A California legislator told Reuters she was drafting legislation that, if passed, would prohibit the scanning of e-mail in order to serve ads. In England, watchdog group Privacy International filed a complaint that Gmail would violate the European Union's privacy laws. But some are not apprehensive of the new service. Some Gmail supporters (most of them trial users themselves) pointed out to critics that they ignored the fact that automated software already scans the contents of your incoming e-mail messages. Also they say that the Gmail ads are text-only, in the same format used for the ads next to Google's search engine results. Plus, its user-friendly! Ten years from now, we'll probably look back at the Gmail dust-up with similar befuddlement, but who knows what lies ahead for this idealistic Web innovation. Only time can tell whether it fails or succeeds.

Some passages taken from Slate.com