Author: Pat Skinner

Information is everyone’s most valuable asset, from corporate conglomerates to college students. If one assumes people tend to search for what they’re interested in, then its probably not a stretch to say that Google has more information about the personal activities and interests of its millions of customers than most companies have had in the history of, well, history. This is why John makes a good point.

Google can’t (yet) reasonably attribute it’s collected user information to a specific person, but rather to an IP address (only geographic information). Surely Gmail with its generous 1GB 2GB+ of storage has proven useful for many people, just like Google search has been for the past few years. But even if I didn’t already have free web email, I wouldn’t use it.

Being in the business of information management and organization gives you a lot of power, exhibited by the huge revenue Google receives through targeted advertising systems. To successfully target customers, it must acquire as much information uniquely attributed to each of its customers as possible. This means Gmail, just like the rest of Google, must acquire information about its users by parsing through emails for information.

Here’s the rub. The content of every search query I perform is entirely controlled by me, but the situation is turned around with email. I clearly wouldn’t ever search for things like my SSN or passwords on a public search engine. However, if I forgot a password to a website, the first option I tend to use is “Send password to user email account.”

Even though Google uses a cookie to uniquely ID it’s search users to create a user history, and even though mine is set to expire (at a rather generous) “Sunday, January 17, 2038 6:33:16 AM”, I trade that privacy for Google’s convenience factor. That, and it’s a trivial matter to nuke cookies. Crawling the contents of user’s email, even if it is automated, crosses my privacy line.

Paranoid? Maybe. But even if I have to run my own mail server, I won’t be letting 3rd parties sift through my emails.

Apple really is finding itself embroiled in more than a few lawsuits these days. Once, I would have chalked such legal issues up to the Apple user culture. Back when I was a Maclot, I felt entitled to a more competitive degree of quality what with the significant extra costs going Apple entails, but these days evidence indicates there simply are quite pervasive quality issues Apple needs to work out.

Back in 2001 Apple initiated a power adapter recall for more than 500,000 power adapters sold between 1998 and 2000. According to the Consumer Product Safety Division, the adapters could get too hot, causing fires and what have you. I had a 1999 WallStreet that fell into this category, and happily receieved a replacement adapter at Apple’s cost. I didn’t think much of it either, chalking it up to an Apple fluke. (Incidentally, the power adapter I receieved was an iBook yo-yo style adapter that didn’t really fit the PowerBook. It looked like someone had used a pair of pliers to pry the width of the plug out a bit so it would fit into the PowerBook, leaving an ugly gap in the plug.)

Fast forward to 2005. Recently in the mail, I received two district court documents from California. It turns out that Apple is being hit quite hard with class action lawsuits, one regarding the iPod, the other a power adapter fiasco redux. Even more telling are the lawsuit settlement notices that greet every visitor to apple.com. The iPod lawsuit is about (surprise surprise) the battery replacement issues, the other that the replacement power adapter also failed.

Beleagured? Hardly. The iPod has proven to be hugely successful, with more iPods sold than Macs.