Sure it costs nothing and offers 1 GB of storage, but Google’s newly announced Gmail service gives some privacy advocates the creeps. A program would scan missives for keywords and serve ads based on the content. [Wired News]
Update – 4:28PM
Cnet has similar coverage as well.
I’m not sure the targeted messaging bothers me so much within a free product. It gives Google great incentive to make an already good product (AdWords) better through a crazy amount of text to search (X users x up to a Gig of email). It is after-all a free product, so you would expect some ads. It should be a whole lot nicer than, the banners you get slammed with on Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. My guess is that the ads will be pretty relevant and probably get a pretty good click-through… have to start seeing how people report conversion numbers once the service is live.