My concern is my parents whose IT provider had them set up an email account which “takes advantage of the powerful google spam filtering tools”. While it looks as if the email comes from the IT provider itself i.e. @.com.au, the email does use the gmail servers in some way. At least that what it looked like I set it up.

They never even look at gmail.

We’ll be finding out what the situation is here.

I migrated to Gmail from two other email services (still functional) about a year ago. Now, I am giving serious consideration to terminating Gmail and returning to my previous email services.

On the Google help page I did not find any easy way to disable Buzz. By luck I chanced upon your article from an NYT article link. What a life saver. Your instructions were clear and straightforward, even for the technically challenged, such as myself.

David Gossen

You’re right that Gmail is free — but the company benefits economically from your presence and use of the service. Your rights and Google’s rights are still governed by contract through the terms of use and privacy policy (and relevant regulations, although I don’t know if any of those are in play here).

And you’re right that email has huge security implications. Even encrypted messages don’t hide the identity of the recipient, for example. But… lots of people use email for information that is personal to them in their own lives, even if not exactly the level of secrecy of launch codes. And email has other benefits, such as a limited type of anonymity that benefits bloggers and journalists.

Where I disagree is the idea that we chose this. Google had not previously exposed this sort of user information in this way — especially not with email. The products affected by Buzz (Gmail, Profiles, Reader, and Picasa) did not work this way before. Lots of people were very surprised at how the separate social spheres they kept had suddenly and without their consent been mashed together based, in part, on information they thought was totally private (their email patterns).

You say, “you can delete your account and use something else.” I agree that people should be able to make this choice. But the chance to acquiesce after is no substitute for our consent before. With privacy breaches — where it is frequently impossible to un-ring the bell — that distinction makes all the difference.

Sure, its disturbing that they decided to connect everyone’s address books without asking, but again, they own the service, its free, and if you don’t like it you can delete your account and use something else.