14 DAY TRIAL // The privacy of ones email is, among others, one of the most important features by which you choose your @company.com mail address. As such, it is very important for you to trust the provider of the mail service to not snoop into any of your messages, be them work related or emotional and intimate. And then came Google with its GMail that all of a sudden arose a lot of interest, because of the fact that it was new and most important, constantly being worked upon in order to improve it.
Their privacy policy, however, is written in a way that leaves a lot of room for interpretation, sentences like "Google maintains and processes your Gmail account and its contents" can be found in it and they pose serious threats to one's privacy, or at least that's how I see the matter.
Philipp Lenssen, of blogoscoped.com, had the same doubts about it and he sent the people over at the Mountain View headquarters an email and asked for further details on the matter, regarding which Google employees were involved with the "processing" and what exactly that meant, and whether the option in Google Talk to take the discussion "off the record" was actually doing something. Accepting an answer to that last one sounds like it requires a huge leap of faith to ask the maker of something if their product works. Nevertheless, a good question, indeed.
The answer came and, in my opinion, it was not that revelatory to the matter. It had the usual "bla-bla" about how important privacy was to them and reassured that the information in the emails was only given on a need-to-know basis to their employees, who have previously agreed in writing to special restrictions specially designed to protect the users' privacy. The interesting parts are to follow:
"For Gmail, only a very small set of Gmail-team employees interacts with user data and - importantly - only accesses the minimum amount of user data required for their task. The vast majority of tasks involve looking only at details about the message, not the content of the mail itself. For example, a debugging task or an abuse prevention task might require just the message header.
We are continually looking for ways to automate tools or processes to further reduce the need for even this limited set of people to view systems with personal information.
As for your Google Talk question: When a user takes a chat 'off the record', anything exchanged from that point forward is not saved in either user's Gmail account or anywhere by Google".
That doesn't sound very convincing to me, it rather sounds like it is a way to say "down, Dino, down!", to paraphrase Fred Flintstone. It's an ambiguous answer to a question about ambiguity. The one about the emails, the one about Google Talk, as I said, need a lot of trust just to expect an honest-to-God answer.