Read My Mail, Please: "The real threat of using Web mail—from Google or from anyone else—is having your mail itself subpoenaed or just plain leaked. Web mail accounts have been cracked despite the best efforts of their administrators.

"CNET cyber-rights advocate Declan McCullagh listed past security breaches at Yahoo! and Hotmail in a column this week, then slammed critics of Gmail's ad plan on his Politech mailing list. 'I'm starting to suspect that these pro-regulatory privacy folks who are so upset about Google are really just anti-advertising,' he wrote, because they haven't raised similar cries over antispam software."

Declan continued: "They claim Gmail's text scanning (done entirely by a machine) is so awful and invasive and intrusive. And of course they do this from the comfort of their own email accounts, which are text-scanned by an anti-spam program (also done entirely by a machine). What's the difference?"