Previously, I wrote that I decided never to use GMail, because I found a clause in their EULA to be creepy. The clause was that they were allowed to preserve my data forever, even after I had requested for it to be deleted. When I request for data to be deleted, the data would simply not show up in my searches, but it would still be available to Google. You can read that earlier post to see what kind of things can be done with with this data.

I specifically used the term “creepy” to emphasize that this was an emotional response, rather than a rational one. I don’t believe Google (nor any one of its employees) is trying to gather information specifically on me. I’m well aware that it’s “just business”, and I’m one of a billion profiles Google is building up in its database, for the purpose of targeting advertisement.

I don’t even think targeted advertisement is in itself a bad thing. The ads that people find annoying are non-targeted ads. I’m not interested in e-mails inviting me to conferences I will never attend, cheap Rolex watches, nor penis enhancing pills. If the advertisers had done some profiling, they’d see that these ads are thoroughly ineffective on me.

In contrast, the other day I got an e-mail telling me a new Monkey Island game is coming out. I immediately whipped out my credit card and pre-ordered. I don’t resent this advertisement. In fact, I am grateful that it had alerted me to the existence of a product that I didn’t know I so badly wanted until I knew it existed.

So if I don’t have a problem with targeted advertisement, why this resentment with Google Mail in particular and profiling in general? I can think of a couple of reasons, but I’m not sure which ones are genuine, and which are merely rationalizations.

In many mythologies and folklores, knowing someone’s “true name” gives you power over them. Now I have no idea how this belief came to be, but as someone who believes in evolutionary psychology, when I see a behaviour existing across various societies and cultures, I suspect that such behaviour may have been genetically selected in us. Thus without knowing exactly why, I believe that we are genetically predisposed towards believing that knowing someone’s “true name” gives you power over them. If this is so, we should see why we would have this genetic predisposition to also fear allowing others to know our “true name”. There needn’t be a rational reason for this fear; our brain is simply wired up to fear it. So maybe that’s why I fear Google knowing too much about me.

Another possibility is my witnessing Yahoo and other IT companies divulging their records and granting access to their databases to the Chinese government, which allowed said government to identify and capture political dissidents. Now, you might dismiss this as mere paranoia, arguing that Canada (where I live) is nothing like China. That may be so, but I don’t think Canada is incomparable to North America nor the United Kingdom. And the US has granted itself the power to indefinitely detain people without trial for “future crimes”, and the UK has about four million cameras watching all of its citizens all of the time. Plus Canada itself has some history with the English vs French conflict in Quebec, and the agent provocateurs at Montebello Summit (which I may blog about more in the future).