Google email and privacy concerns

California State Senator Liz Figueroa is drafting legislation that will block Google's announced free email service, Gmail. This would, of course, only affect California. Other states and/or the federal government may address the issue if this legislation passes.

The concern is over Gmail's proposed advertising practices which include scanning a user's incoming email and then inserting targeted ads into the email (presumably at the end of the text) based on words found in the email. This goes beyond what other "free" email services like Hotmail and Yahoo do when they insert ads for the service into a user's outgoing email. On the other hand, they will also be offering far more storage space (a gigabyte per user) than any of the other services offer for their no-charge accounts.

My current opinion on this issue consists of two parts:

1. As long as the users are notified prominently and clearly that this is going to happen, and they specifically agree to it, I don't have a problem with Google doing this in exchange for offering this service which otherwise has no cost to the user.


2. I will never use Gmail.

This also brings up an interesting scenario. What kind of ads will be inserted into spam emails which are already ads?