GMail Privacy: Much Ado About Nothing?

I've been using my new GMail account for a little over a week now. I haven't used it for any personal e-mail, but I've used it as the contact address for some deals over Craig's List and other assorted communications.

There's a lot of paranoia about GMail's privacy policies, and it centers mostly around the fact that GMail displays targeted text ads like the ones displayed in the column on the right of this site. A lot of people take this to mean that Google is reading your e-mail to choose the ads. The application that chooses the ads does so in real time based on keywords in whatever page you're viewing. I don't consider this to be problematic at all. They are storing the content of your e-mail anyway, and they're not doing anything with it that any other free web-based e-mail service doesn't do.

The other source of paranoia comes from the fact that GMail's privacy policy states that your e-mail may remain on their servers for "some time" after you delete it or close your account. I don't think this is unusual at all, although perhaps the disclosure in the privacy policy is. All e-mail providers and ISPs have the ability to or reconstruct your e-mail for "some time" after you delete it.

One of the more valid concerns about GMail is the possibility that Google could link your GMail account with your usage of the Google search engine. Google's cookie keeps track of every search term you enter into Google and it might be very intrusive for that information to be linked with your identity. There are some ways to attempt to get around this (deleting Google's cookie on a regular basis, using separate browsers for GMail and Google Search), but the privacy policy states that Google will not give that kind of information to anyone.

On balance, I don't feel that my usage of GMail compromises my privacy any more than any other free web-based e-mail service. I don't conduct sensitive business over free e-mail, but I understand that there is no such thing as "deleted" e-mail. It can pretty much be retrieved from anywhere at any time if someone really wants to get it. I'll probably treat my GMail just as a free 1000MB storage area for files and things that I want to send to myself. It certainly won't become my main e-mail service any time soon. But I think it could be very successful if the privacy fears were allayed.