Privacy International: "PI intensifies pressure on Google's Gmail service

Privacy International has filed a complaint asking the privacy and data protection commissions in France,Germany, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Spain, Czech Republic, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Portugal, Poland, Austria,Australia and Canada along with the European Commission and the EU Commissioners internal Article 29 Data Protection Working Group to investigate the serious privacy problems that Google's Gmail service poses."

London Free Press: Business Section - Google faces fight on privacy: "Google's free e-mail service, Gmail, has come under attack by privacy rights groups that claim it violates privacy laws in many countries. Many Internet service providers (ISPs) offer free e-mail with a limited amount of space to store messages. Gmail's generous 1GB storage capacity comes at a price -- the user's exposure to targeted advertisements based on the contents of their e-mails.

Google's free e-mail storage capacity is more than 100 times that offered by established rivals such as Yahoo and Hotmail. The service is promoted as a means for a user to create a centralized and permanent e-mail archive.

Privacy International filed complaints against Gmail with privacy regulators in Australia, Canada and 15 countries in Europe. "

SignOnSanDiego.com > News > Technology -- Google's free Gmail service comes under fire overseas: "Google's free e-mail service Gmail is under fresh fire from an international privacy rights group that said the soon-to-be-launched service violated privacy laws across Europe and elsewhere.

Privacy International, which has offices in the United States and Europe, said it filed complaints with privacy and data-protection regulators in Europe, Canada and Australia. It had already filed an initial complaint in Britain. "

Bits & Bytes for April 22, 2004: "Google Pressured On Privacy

Yet more Google news: the search giant's plans to include contextually targeted ads in its still-in-beta free e-mail service, Gmail, have drawn more fire.

The search giant intends to have its technology scan the content of e-mail messages, and target ads accordingly. The plan has generated privacy concerns and widespread criticism.

The free consumer service comes with 1 gigabyte of storage and the ability to easily search through old messages. The price of that is letting the company apply its highly successful keyword-advertising infrastructure to the content of the messages. Privacy International is the latest group to protest on grounds of privacy. The group filed a complaint Monday asking privacy and data protection commissions in sixteen countries to investigate potential invasion of consumers' privacy.

The international electronic privacy watchdog complained that the proposed service violates several statutes of the European Union's Data Protection law.

Google says what's drawing concern is what computers are capable of doing, not what the company does in reality. 'We pride ourselves in protecting users' data and holding ourselves to the highest standard,' said Wayne Rosing, VP of engineering for Google.

'We do not keep that data in correlated form, it's separated in various ways and we have policies inside the company that do not allow that kind of correlation to happen. We consider any program or programming that correlates user data with user identity to be a violation of trust and we do not do that,' said Rosing."