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I'm sure everyone has heard about this already, if not check the links below for the full information on the story: http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2013/08/20/its-not-a-surprise-that-gmail-users-have-no-reasonable-expectation-of-privacy/ http://www.salon.com/2013/08/14/gmail_users_have_no_reasonable_expectation_of_privacy/ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=219176873 It sounds like Google is saying that everyone's privacy is safe, except for the people that email gmail accounts from email accounts outside of google.. But wouldn't that imply that gmail user is having their incoming emails read and thus their privacy is being affected as well? The thing is, pretty much all email is insecure and people don't realize it. Whenever you send an email, it is on the server you sent it from and another copy of it is on the server it was received at. Key employees at whatever data centers those servers are located in, can access and read that email in its entirety. Emails can also be read by hosting companies, the hosting company's web host and up the chain all the way to the data center staff. The larger the corporation, the more employees that could potentially have access to your email. If you connect to a free wifi somewhere and access your email through a smartphone app that is not set for secure ssl connections, then any wifi network admin can access or log your email and any other user on that wifi system could technically access your email as long as they know how to do it. Email is not secure. All the companies that can access it have privacy policies just like google. All employees are restricted to accessing personal information and are only supposed to do it when assisting a customer with an issue. The shear bulk of email out there pretty much limits individuals from wanting to spy on you specifically, but with all these large companies data mining everything out there, I can see why people would be concerned about their data being used to profile them. From what I've seen, they don't just scan the one email when they display an ad on your page.. they give you massive storage space so it can scan all emails to target their ads for you. What do you think? Is google harvesting people's emails to add to their massive data mining operation? or are they only scanning your emails for advertisements? BTW, have you every used google maps? If you use it over the years then they know your address thats associated to your IP#.. clear your browser cache, delete all cookies, etc.. then go back to google maps, start typing your address and watch how quickly google remembers who you are. (then again, they might have changed this, I haven't tested it lately.)