Gmail remembers everything. As it reminded me this morning at login, "Over 7404.846605 megabytes (and counting) of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message." Keep it all: that is the program's basic premise.
Gmail recalls when we forget. This is convenient, but is it good?
I have been accumulating messages ever since I opened my account on October 5, 2004, when I joined the first wave of Gmail converts in gleefully discarding the constraints of memory. Gone were the days of hoarding my favorite messages and zealously purging the chaff. Deleting was a drag, and besides, it was ever more time consuming. No longer with Gmail. I now have 38,968 messages in my inbox, 18,837 in my sent box, 725 drafts and untold gchats fossilized in the Google cloud. Not to mention the attachments, with countless photos and documents. The record spans schools, jobs, girlfriends, secrets--about 20% of my lifetime thus far, in fact. Content ranges from the inane to the intimate: drunken chatting, work memos, college essays, love missives.
Sound familiar? Now that we live online, our lives get recorded.
Gmail is a new kind of diary, a living portrait of each user reflected in their e-mails. It is less a self-portrait than an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, but in some ways it is more honest than a diary because we often forget we are writing for posterity. This means less self-censorship and more grist for the archives. Untold treasures await biographers of the Gmail generation.
Not only is the record vast, but it is searchable. No need to hunt through mounds of dusty snail mail. Just insert search terms and see what ghosts the ladle brings up from the bubbling cauldron.
The eggheads at Google have conjured an uncanny archivist at the service of every single account holder. The archivist is indefatigable and infallible, a goalie that stops all pucks and a juggler that drops no balls. He copies, stores, fetches and sorts. All this within milliseconds, for free.
Omniscience has its perks. On a daily basis I dart through past messages to locate names, phone numbers, directions, or instructions. When my computer crashes I find earlier drafts. When someone says I-told-you-so, I sometimes get to call their bluff. Gmail is my safety net, my storage box, my personal assistant, my lie detector.
So what's the problem?
To begin, we are increasingly exposing ourselves to others. The insidious genius of Gmail is that its users consent to self-surveillance. Just as my inbox stores messages to me, my outgoing messages are stored in the inboxes of the recipients. An e-mail is forever. We implicitly entrust our thoughts in others, as they do to us, for perpetuity. I, for one, have been more trusting of the medium than it deserves. There is plenty of material for embarrassment, maybe some for blackmail. Gone are the days when you can demand your letters back.
There is, of course, the likely possibility that others have accessed or will access my account without my knowledge. There is no way to know. E-mails are read without tearing envelopes. I am among those who avoided a diary because of its sheer materiality. It was an object to be plundered by a snooping sibling or parent, something I could lose or misplace. I trusted the paperlessness of e-mail. It disappears when I logout, or so I tell myself. As with online forms and payments, we compromise privacy under the mantra of convenience.
Maybe Gmailers have reconciled themselves to this vulnerability. That's the price of entry. The medium preserves the messages. So what? But even supposing that I am the only person who will ever access my Gmail account, and that no one will ever use my e-mails for devious purposes, the idea of a comprehensive archive of my e-communications leaves me with a deep malaise.
Sometimes it's better to forget.
If you had the option to sign up for comprehensive video record of your entire life à la Truman Show, free of charge, would you take it? I think not. We have things to hide from eternity. The banal, for instance. There shall be no record of my picking my nose, thank you very much. And the hurtful. Scars may linger, but each written dagger should not.
The hidden danger of Gmail is that it creates a link to the past that is too strong, too convenient. Our mistakes and our frailties lie right below the surface, revisited with ease. It is possible that Gmail users who don't delete their messages have created their very own historical panopticons. We may be able to see our entire written record, but it also looks at us. Preservation gives the past more weight than it sometimes deserves.
Perhaps we should not fear the truths of the past. Perhaps it is best to reconcile with it rather than bury it. And yes, a Gmail account may lay bare our hypocrisies, contradictions, weaknesses, multiplicities--but this, after all, is part of who we are. It might make it more difficult than ever to build a coherent sense of self, but perhaps it is not a great evil that it has become harder to lie to ourselves.
And yet there is a difference between self-deception and distancing the things we cannot bear to remember. Consider the case of the heartbroken. All the times she was right and he was wrong--it's all there, a moment's search away. Who wants instant replay of relationship death throes? At the click of a button, Gmail turns whispers of the past into shouts. And because it is there, and because minds wander to what might have been, some of us time-warp more than we should. We can, so we do. Sometimes I wish I couldn't.
The obvious solution, of course, is to delete. Yet my index finger still quivers above my mouse when I ready an archival guillotine. Somehow Gmail has managed to make trashing messages feel like an act of cowardice. Gmail earns our appreciation for the small conveniences of infallible memory, but we ignore the virtues of forgetting.
We cannot lament all footprints that fade in a snowstorm.
Steve Tack: Google Really Cares About Web Speed -- Why You Should Also
In some respects, there's nothing new about the situation you discuss: people have always had to decide what to do with old letters, photographs, etc. However, in the digital era, it's much easier to amass huge collections of digital stuff. As a professional archivist, I'm kind of pleased: the documentary record of life in the late 20th/early 21st century may be particularly comprehensive as a result. (Sadly, owing to rapid technological change and digital materials' inherent instability, it's also quite possible that the historical record will be painfully sparse.) As someone who has digital (and paper) files of her own, I'm keenly aware of the emotional cost of keeping materials that stir up old hurts and regrets.
If you don't want to delete older files, consider storing them elsewhere. If, for example, most of your GMail searches center upon e-mails sent or received in the past year, export your older messages to a separate account and do follow-up exports every 6-12 months. You'll have easy access to older messages, but won't encounter them during routine searches.
One last thing: the above advice concerns short-term access, not long-term preservation. The latter truly is a daunting challenge.
33 of them think you're missing the point (I'm being polite, by the way). One thought you a poet.
Here's #35:
You're "right". We're giving away all our secrets and posting them—if not publicly—in places where they are all but certain to become public through one set of circumstances or another.
And so?
I remember back in the mid-1990s when I was one of the go-to guys for newspapers and radio programs seeking comment on "the dangers of the internet". OH MY GOODNESS HOW DO WE PROTECT OUR CHILDREN FROM THIS MONSTER??!!??
We don't. We instead accept the change that's occurring and plan for/with/around it. I'll use the same metaphor I used back then: When your child is old enough to cross the street you can try to postpone or stop the inevitable, or you can simple teach them to look both ways before they cross.
This is no different. And as the youngest among us are taking the fewest precautions and doing so en masse (hello Blippy!) it looks like a change that's going to take hold.
So by all means be careful if that's what suits you. But the discussion is purely an academic one.
Now excuse me, I have some Googling to do.
Jeff Yablon
President & CEO
Answer Guy
Virtual VIP on Twitter
If Big Brother is watching us all, he must be really, really bored.
Just another reality of the times we live in. Every reality has its advantages and disadvantages.
4:30pm
Alexandria, VA
I am much less concerned about the information I have stored than I am about the information I never receive.
Mail theft, ID theft, and interference with my e-mail communications are a problem for me.
When friends started sending "invitations" to join Gmail, they said it lets everyone know when they're online. That was enough for me to decline without looking into it.
Obviously, privacy isn't expected when we're online, but why give up whatever shred is left?
There are other free storage vaults available that may be more secure.
Not a worry to me so much specifically as I do not use Gmail but for required contacts (google doc access, etc) and pretty much for related reasons to those which you state. I avoid Gchat, Gmail and related as much as possible, cuz I'm not one so casually willing to supply my life's data (just for a free app) to one massive eye in the sky-fi...
1. set up your own email server, and do a good job of it
2. both the sender and recipient must use accounts on that email server - no routing emails through any other server
3. use SSL and/or TLS for all communication with the email server
4. encrypt your emails with PGP
5. for both PGP and TLS/SSL, use the strongest encryption available
6. never use wireless
The email message must still traverse the internet, going through dozens of ISP routers. The message can be intercepted at any of these points. If the NSA gets a hold of the message, they can crack the encryption. They don't allow us to have anything they can't crack. But it should be safe from most people.
If you wanted to, you could set up your own email server using Ubuntu or another free linux distribution, and have total control over all your emails, etc. ....until someone breaks in because you aren't a security expert, or because some curious teenage misanthrope is better at hacking than whomever is at protecting.
You could also prevent yourself from sharing your secrets with anyone around you by not speaking. But that's kind've a crappy existence.
The online community is best maintained as that. A community. If Gmail breaks their vow of 'do no evil', people will flock to a new service. it happens all the time. Just look at the empty shell that is MySpace.
Google is a advertising/marketing company. They provide free services in exchange for the ability to index your material. That is the transaction. I can see why people who don't know that might be shocked, but it's never been a secret.
My $.02
Privacy in the public arena is dead or at least dying.