What Did I Tell You?

Why do we let this creepy company called Google spy on our emails?



By Angela Levin


To many, the colourful home page of Google is the friendly face of the internet. Indeed, the company, which was created 12 years ago by two American PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, has always prided itself on its quirky presentation.


The hallways of the ‘Googleplex’ headquarters in California are stuffed with pianos, lava lamps, games and funky furniture for the enjoyment of staff, its webpage often features specially designed logos for days such as Halloween, Christmas and national festivals and – crucially – Google gives away its software for free.


Add to that its rather hippyish business principles (‘You can make money without doing evil’, ‘You can be serious without a suit’, ‘Work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun’), its corporate philanthropy and its clashes with the Chinese government over free speech, and it is easy to see why Google is often regarded as a warm, fluffy ‘good guy’.


Pride: The 'Googleplex' headquarters in California, pictured, are packed with lava lamps, pianos and funky furniture


The only mystery seemed to be how, exactly, it managed to achieve revenues of more than £15 billion last year.


In truth, though, it is a creepy, multi¬national company that spies on us, as I found out a week ago after I foolishly left my laptop in the back of a London taxi.


I made some disconcerting discoveries about Google that have left me deeply unhappy about the business practices of this most apparently ‘cuddly’ of corporate giants.


Like 190 million others, I had signed up for Google’s free service Gmail to write and receive emails.


This was a new development for me, replacing Microsoft Office Outlook, which was largely trouble-free but which I found cumbersome to use away from my home internet connection.


Various friends advised me to switch to Gmail, saying it was easy to use and accessible from anywhere. It was simple to set up an account, and at first I barely noticed the advertisements that pay for the service. There is space for eight adverts down the side of the screen on the Gmail page, plus another across the top.


I was bereft when I lost my laptop and absolutely overjoyed a few days later when the taxi driver emerged from the snowed-in wilds of Essex and returned it to me. I immediately emailed friends with the good news.


But within a second of the email being sent, a column of adverts had appeared down the right hand side of my Gmail screen. The adverts offered me the chance to ‘save hundreds’ on a new PC.


A shiver slid slowly down my spine. The adverts were being specifically targeted at me because of what I had written in a private email to a friend. Though I found the discovery deeply creepy, I carried on using Gmail, noticing all the time that I couldn’t write anything to anyone without Gmail offering me comments, suggestions and temptations.


Electronic spy: Angela Levin found that using Gmail made her a target for adverts based on information in her private emails


This might just be tolerable when the email is innocuous. But it certainly was not when I recently emailed a lawyer about a difficult and sensitive problem and back came a host of offers advertising various lawyers and help with a legal compromise agreement.


I felt as if I were being stalked and the experience left me with a raft of questions. What does Google know about me? How dare they invade my privacy? And is there a hidden agenda?


A honey-voiced Google spokesman was quick to respond to my call and insisted the adverts were generated not by a human being, but by a computer programme that all servers use to scan emails looking for spam and viruses. And that no information was read or sold to advertisers.


That may be true, but Google does use the content of your emails for commercial gain. It scans your words and searches for key words in the same way it does when you use the Google search engine.


When a key word from your email matches a key word in an advert in the Google bank, the relevant adverts electronically line up to hit first your email page and then your pocket.


Advertisers are invited to bid for key words. Popular phrases such as ‘cheap flights’ command vastly more money than, say, ‘arachibutyrophobia’ – the fear of peanut butter sticking to your mouth.


The advertiser is then charged on a cost-per-click basis – the more people who click on the advert and go through to the advertiser’s website, the more they pay. This is how Google makes its £15 billion a year and it is what you are signing up for, however inadvertently, when you click on Google’s terms and conditions.


It doesn’t, of course, explain why they also scan emails that arrive from non-Gmail users.


In theory, there are ways you can fool Google and block the adverts. The robotic searchers seem to have a smidgin of sen¬sitivity, and if you mention suicide, murder, death, 9/11 or some other catastrophe in your email no adverts will appear, but only, it seems, if you type in the word often enough.


An American professor of new media, Joe McKay, discovered that the ads disappear if you mention something tragic at least once every 167 words.


Another twist: The Google street-mapping car gathered personal information


You can get the same effect through the liberal use of vile four-letter words in your email, but this seems more to protect the sensibilities of the advert¬isers, who might not want their products to be associated with such language. In practice, of course, neither course of action is workable. It also helps to carefully ¬balance the pros and cons of using Gmail.


On the one hand it is free, but then so are Hotmail and Yahoo – which both also rely on advertising, but which don’t appear to trawl through your emails and hit you with intrusive ads within milliseconds.


Gmail does have some advantages – it allows several people to have access to documents at the same time.


But given that your messages are stored on vast remote servers that could be vulnerable to hackers, it makes sense for you to delete emails that contain sensitive information, and also to create a separate email address for online shopping, as these are the messages that will draw the most attention for marketing.


And remember that while emails may seem ephemeral, they can be difficult to delete. Once a message is erased, it may take up to 60 days before it disappears from the Google servers - and Google admits that it keeps back-up copies in case of system failure.


Whatever precautions you take, anyone signing up for a Gmail account must trust that Google won’t use the sensitive, revealing information contained in the emails you send and receive for any other purpose.


But can it really be trusted? Consider the Street View debacle. A few years ago, Google offered detailed aerial pictures of the whole world to viewers of its Google Earth service.


Then, at what must have been enormous cost, Google sent out vehicles with specialised equipment across several continents to capture street-level views of both main and side roads in cities, town and villages.


Initially it sounded fun to have the possibility of a virtual tour of any street. And how philanthropic to record our landscape for posterity.


But the next thing we heard was that these vehicles were not just taking pictures, but also searching electronically for wireless networks, logging whether individuals had secure or insecure wi-fi – and gathering personal information.


It was a gross invasion of privacy and rightly caused an uproar. Google quickly apologised, saying it was a mistake. But how could it mistakenly do something that had nothing to do with its stated purpose?


The question remains: if a company can misbehave so badly once, why can’t it happen again?


If Google is so ethical and friendly, then how has it become a sinister multinational giant that spies on the contents of my personal email?


As for me, I am switching back to the less sophisticated Microsoft Office Outlook. I’ve come to believe that free email is worth exactly what you pay for it.

Now I don't feel I was over reacting!