Long-time Hawk Wings readers will know that Google and data privacy are an old hobby horse of mine. (Many interesting things about Google, privacy and data ownership are summarised in a earlier Hawk Wings post, “Turning your back on Gmail”.)

Gene at Fred’s house worries about it too.

He looks around his Desktop and sees Google This and Google That and Google The Other Thing. He’s becoming dependent on Google apps to get through the day. And each new, undeniably clever and good, constantly improving Google app adds to the amount of data that Google knows about him.

He has an idea:

I think I need a new Google product to drop into beta. That would be, let’s see, Google Data Privacy. GDP would allow me to review all of the information that Google retains on me across all services, from all devices, and from all sources. GDP would allow me to determine the maximum data retention period for each of my services. GDP would allow me to selectively opt out of cross-service data mining & correlation, even if it reduced the quality of the services I receive. GDP would allow me to correct any inaccurate data in my profile. And GDP would log and alert me when my data was queried by other services.

I want my Google Data Privacy.

Google, gmail, privacy, data ownership, data protection, new beta, internet, Web 2.0

Some people worry about Gmail, data ownership and privacy. But not Nitin Jagga.

He provides nine reasons why concerns about Gmail are “bogus”.

Three of the reasons are actually Gmail features that have “entranced” him, but it is still a useful collection of the kinds of arguments that people will put in Gmail’s defence.

Is the argument convincing? Hmmm…..

UPDATE: As Christian points out in the comments, Nitin’s post is a word-for-word rip-off of an article by Tim O’Reilly published in 2004.gmail, Google, privacy, data ownership, Don’t worry be happy, email

A little while ago, I posted an entry about Gmail, privacy and data ownership that contained some important things that were news to me.

Last Friday Google released a revised general privacy policy and a revised policy for Gmail.

In the Gmail policy, you can read more about the fate of deleted messages:

You may organize or delete your messages through your Gmail account or terminate your account through the Google Account section of Gmail settings. Such deletions or terminations will take immediate effect in your account view. Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems.

CNET News has published an article on the new policies with some comment. There is also discussion on Slashdot.

I can’t decide if this quote from the CNET article is reassuring or just funny:

Brad Hill, author of “Google for Dummies,” said there was no cause for alarm.

Google, Gmail, privacy, data ownership, policy, deleted messages