Pudding, Gmail and No Free Lunch

Thanks Peter for your post on Pudding.

My initial thoughts: I must say I find it bewildering that one would give permissions to a commericial agent to "spy" on one's phone conversations and to knowingly sollicit a barrage of advertisements, albeit well-targeted ones. I have maintained great friendships far and wide thanks to the telephone. On many levels, the privacy of my conversations is sacred. The fact that I would breach that confidence to be monitored even by a machine makes me uncomfortable. It is certainly a service that I would easily pass up.

My Discovery: Well, given my sentiment, you can imagine my surprise at discovering that Google was "pudding-ing" my e-mail correspondences! I am new to G-mail and, at first, it was not really registering with me what was going on in the right margin of my inbox. It was only in my recent collaboration with Dave that I started noticing lists on the right of the inbox thematically linked to the content. At first, I thought that they were perhaps links that my correspondent was posting for me. It was not until I opened an e-mail from a French correspondent and watched all those right hand links covert to a series of French links that I realized I was being pudding-ing. While this does not bother me at Amazon - books are peddled to me based on previous purchases or previous searches, scanning e-mail correspondences does. I guess it is the price one pays for "free services." I am now considering perhaps another e-mail service that will not subject e-mail to such trolling. On some level, I should just trust that the systems will not be abused. Is it purely machine generated with no trace beyond the instant it posts? Hard to know and a leap of faith.
Just one more reason for me to detest e-mail!
-Laura