Devangshu Datta: Mailed to order

TECHNOBEAT

Company mission statements are among the most pompous examples of corporate-speak. Given that, Google's succinct "Don't be Evil" is a model of brevity. Until Google announced its new free e-mail service, the search-engine's mega-million userbase swallowed the slogan wholesale.

Like other Google concepts, Googlemail, or "Gmail" (http://gmail. google.com) sets new technological paradigms. Gmail offers an incredible 1 gigabyte in storage, 100 times as much as most paid e-mail services. Every message can contain 10 megabyte attachments.

Gmail has built-in search-and-sort technology allowing users to find specific messages with minimal trouble. Gmail users will not have to delete either in-box or out-box content for lack of space, and they'll never mislay mails. Gmail also offers a new filter, promising to eliminate most viruses and to guard users from the tender attentions of those promising to enhance specific body parts and shady credit-card issuers.

Each individual feature is a "killer-app". In fact, some surfers thought Gmail was a joke because it promised so much and it was announced on April Fools' Day. But Gmail is already experimentally operational (you can register for the full service as and when it's launched).

There's one fly in the ointment. The flaw is big enough and fundamental enough to have united an unlikely coalition of privacy experts and legislators in strident demands that the service be blocked even before it is formally launched.

Gmail works on the same search technology that makes Google the best Net search-engine and a monster brandname. The revenue model is based on searching through messages in the Gmail accounts, analysing key-words and links to deliver directed advertising to users.

Not only is there no necessity to delete mailbox contents, deletion is actually impossible "" Google archives to finetune its analysis. Mails are backed up and will remain on file after the user thinks they have been deleted or the mail account (a/c) itself is terminated. (This is true for most extant e-mail a/cs, as Enron and Tyco employees have learnt!)

If you spend time discussing science fiction and chess on a Gmail account, you'll get ads offering books, CDs, DVDs and game-playing programs. If, on the other hand, you trade stocks or steamy-videos, you'll be hit with ads on those subjects.

Analysts see Gmail as a key new product. It would boost ad-revenues and expand Google's business portfolio just as the Mountain View, California company gears up for a debut multi-billion initial public offering scheduled for this summer.

The analysis is automated "" human eyes don't pry through Gmail accounts. The ads are to be delivered as clickable boxes, as on the Google search result pages. A click-through to the advertiser would not give that entity access to personal information beyond the knowledge that the surfer had a Gmail a/c.

But Google would possess the personal information and Google can also link to Web-search information by Gmail-users. While Google says that it will not sell or transfer personal information (except under legal compulsion or in a corporate merger involving Google), there is no way to legally enforce delivery on that assurance.

Google also refuses to rule out the linking of Web searches by Gmail users to their personal account information. In response to a query about this, co-founder Larry Page told the Los Angeles Times, "It might be really useful for us to know that information. I'd hate to rule anything like that out."

The European Union (EU) has stronger privacy laws than the US (or India). Gmail is technically illegal under EU law where users must be in a position to delete their own communications. The company is in talks with EU authorities to thrash out the details of compliance with the relevant EU laws.

Privacy protection advocates have also raised a storm on the other side of the Atlantic. California Senator Liz Figueroa says she intends to draft legislation blocking Gmail. She authored the "Don't call" law that blocks telemarketeer calls in California. With luck, she and her ilk will force a rethink of the Gmail business paradigm.