Battleangel | Personal

As pretty much the last person in the world I signed up for a Google Mail (“Gmail”) account. I’m still not convinced of the brilliance of web mail. There are serious privacy concerns for instance. And web mail is at its best when constantly on the move and needing to read and write emails from remote public terminals. None of which I ever do. That being said, Gmail is pretty much as good as web mail is going to get. It’s free and has a clean, lightweight, ad-free interface. And there are plenty of tools designed to work with Gmail, plus it has a great deal of goodwill working for it.

Perhaps the biggest advantage though — for me personally — is to have a separate dump email account that will never get wiped by a harddrive failure or due to negligence. And as it stands, it seems unlikely that Gmail will ever be blocked by spam blacklists or otherwise compromised. For some reason, I’ve had emails just simply disappear, possibly due to blacklisting. As and individual user or a proprietor of a data center it is almost hopeless when something like that happens. With Gmail you know someone is working on the problem before you have even had time to notice it, mainly because there are millions who depend on the same service. Now, all of this doesn’t mean that I will move to Blogger or Myspace any time soon but I am starting to see the point of central servers and socially integrated software — even if you’re a tech wiz.

Still, it’s seriously eerie to be logged into Google / Blogger / Gmail / Webmaster Tools while doing Google searches for instance. As if it wasn’t bad enough that they could track your IP and aggregate search terms. One thing is for sure — with all the consolidation going on — surveillance of the future certainly wont require tech whizzes. A single backdoor and the intimate lives of people will be plain as day.