Gmail and privacy

I know that I've been posting stuff about privacy concerns with Gmail, so I thought that I'd present the other side as well. Here's what some well-known people (in the geek world) wrote about Gmail. Tim O'Reilly (yes, that O'Reilly book guy) writes in his article:

There are already hundreds of millions of users of hosted mail services at AOL, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo! These services routinely scan all mail for viruses and spam. Despite the claims of critics, I don't see that the kind of automated text scanning that Google would need to do to insert context-sensitive ads is all that different from the kind of automated text scanning that is used to detect spam.

Brad Templeton, chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes a nice balanced view in his article, Privacy Subtleties of GMail.

You can read more stuff about this at Google's page, from where I got the links to these articles.