Recently, a reader of Catholic Tech Tips sent us an email in regards to using Google’s Gmail service. The reader was fearful of how Google might be using their private information and was wondering if it would be better to switch to another service. Josh fielded the question to me, and I dove into research mode, trying to find out exactly what data Google gets, and how, from our private email accounts and other services.
First off, Google has a whole slew of privacy policies that you can go through at your leisure, they can be found here.
The following are what I feel to be the key points of the Gmail terms/privacy policy:
When you use Gmail, Google’s servers automatically record certain information about your use of Gmail. Similar to other web services, Google records information such as account activity (including storage usage, number of log-ins), data displayed or clicked on (including UI elements, ads, links); and other log information (including browser type, IP-address, date and time of access, cookie ID, and referrer URL).
Google maintains and processes your Gmail account and its contents to provide the Gmail service to you and to improve our services. The Gmail service includes relevant advertising and related links based on the IP address, content of messages and other information related to your use of Gmail.
We provide advertisers only aggregated non-personal information such as the number of times one of their ads was clicked. We do not sell, rent or otherwise share your personal information with any third parties except in the limited circumstances described in the Google Privacy Policy, such as when we believe we are required to do so by law.
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.
Ok, now, remember that these terms of use are also coupled with Google’s Privacy Policy and are separate from the terms of service for their other products and services.
So, here is the breakdown.
When you use Gmail, Google’s servers automatically record certain information about your use of Gmail. Similar to other web services, Google records information such as account activity (including storage usage, number of log-ins), data displayed or clicked on (including UI elements, ads, links); and other log information (including browser type, IP-address, date and time of access, cookie ID, and referrer URL).
Google does log each time a user visits Gmail, what they clicked on and how long they were there, in addition to what data was displayed. Now, from my understanding of the first point, I think that refers to what TYPE of content, not the content itself. Basically, Google’s log servers know that a user viewed an email, but, not the email itself. At least, in this point on the list.
Now, the next point is the one that I feel to be very important.
Google maintains and processes your Gmail account and its contents to provide the Gmail service to you and to improve our services. The Gmail service includes relevant advertising and related links based on the IP address, content of messages and other information related to your use of Gmail.
Now, at first there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with this statement. Google will maintain and process your email for you. Being that Gmail is an email service, this makes sense. However, the next line in regards to how they display ads is a little less innocent.
Now, using your IP address to display ads isn’t that big of a deal. Your IP address is a unique identifier for your computer or router on the internet. It can be roughly linked to your location, or at least your town, which, allows ads to be tailored to where you live, again, not too bad.
After the comma, someone might notice the words content of the message. This means that in some way or fashion, most likely through an automated computerized process, Google scans the text of your emails in order to display ads. Now, does this mean there is someone hand-reading your personal emails and saving them on file for a later date? Probably not. However, if a company was concerned about the privacy of internal company emails having trade secrets, I wouldn’t be using Gmail.
Now, again, keep in mind that Google’s main business is advertising. The whole reason that they provide the public with such great, free resources is for the sake of putting ads into them. The ads need to be tailored to the user viewing them and Google must find some way to do that tailoring. The processes they use to do this are automated but, also secret. So one can assume in two different directions on this.
Either:
A. Google uses a completely automated process to scan emails briefly in addition to using your IP address, to be able to display ads that appear to be relevant to you. That process does not “know” or “understand” the content of your emails and is just scanning for key words, etc.
or
B. Google’s servers not only look for keywords in emails but, know exactly what they are about and know every detail or your private life. They then hold onto this information to hand on to advertisers so that they can blackmail you into buying their products.
Alright, maybe not AS extreme as suggestion B but, there are people out there who claim that Google is hording their private information and selling it to advertisers, etc.
The next point brings some level of comfort though:
We provide advertisers only aggregated non-personal information such as the number of times one of their ads was clicked. We do not sell, rent or otherwise share your personal information with any third parties except in the limited circumstances described in the Google Privacy Policy, such as when we believe we are required to do so by law.
Now, if someone really looks into this, including the Google Privacy Policy, there really isn’t much to worry about. Google does provide advertisers with what ads were clicked and displayed. The ONLY time that Google will provide your name, address, phone number, social security number, driver’s license or anything else of that nature is if a user SPECIFICALLY allow this, such as in using Google Checkout on a website. They are NOT sending users’ emails to advertisers.
Again, Google DOES, in an automated fashion, scan a user’s emails while being displayed in order to display relevant ads. While this doesn’t appear to pose an issue to the everyday user, businesses should still use their internal company email systems for private emails, trade secrets or other such information. Better safe than sorry.
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.
Finally, Google does reserve the right to hold onto the data from emails, even if a user deletes them. I am not sure why they might want to indefinitely hold on to deleted emails in their offline backup systems, but, the point is that they can. Google has already promised not to send that information to anyone else so, the reason why they would want to hold them is completely unknown. Maybe for diagnostic or statistical information…who knows. The point is, Google can hold onto a user’s emails as long as they want, even after deleting them from their “active” servers. Again, this is why Gmail is NOT good for business use.
So, overall, I think Gmail is safe for personal use. If a user is really paranoid about what Google might be doing with their emails or what Google might be sharing with others, they can still go to other services such as AOL Mail, Yahoo, Windows Live Mail and other such services. I doubt that they have the same amount of storage space or the search capabilities of Gmail, not to mention the other Google apps.
I am hoping to do a full treatise on internet privacy on CatholiTech.com in the near future but, it will take some time.
Hope that helps!
God Bless,
Chris
