gmail some more

A friend of mine wrote me regarding yesterday's Gmail-related post. His concern:

"In essence, the index can be considered a profile of the email/emails and of the user. So who has ownership of the index? If google has ownership, that sets a worrisome precedent."

I think that the user should own his/her e-mail, but Google should be granted the right to scan/index the e-mail for searching, spam filtering, spell checking, and content ad targeting purposes only. Upon deletion of an e-mail, that right is revoked for that particular e-mail. Upon deletion of an account, that right is revoked for all that user's e-mails. Google may still have residual backups of the user's data for some time, but should not have the right to use or share it with anyone.

On a related topic, here is an interesting blog entry on Google products in general. The author concludes:

"Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system? "

If nothing else, it's a well-written piece of speculation.