I recently caught up with a friend whom I hadn’t talked to in awhile.  We had usually chatted on IM with Yahoo or AIM and had been doing that for years.  Both of our lives had gotten busy with kids and work, so we had switched to email.  Even that had slowed down though as we got busier and busier.  With the new year upon us, I took it as a chance to renew old friendship and emailed her.

She’s an avid scrapbooker and she and her friends had all switched to GTalk and GMail.  She sent me an invitation to GMail and that is where we have been chatting.  After the first day, I went back to a logged chat with her.  I needed a web site link that she had sent me.  What a discovered was a little disturbing.

She is the only person that I have talked to on GTalk and the only email on Gmail that I have received is from her.  In both email and chats we naturally talked about scrapbooking.  It is her passion as is her son.  What discovered were the ads listed on the right side of the screen.  Ads that were superficially and narrowly targeted to scrapbooking. 

As I have posted about in the past, I understand the dilemma of what data to collect and how to use it.  After all, if I have to see ads I want to see those that would at least be of interest or use to me.  What was bothersome though is where the data came from.  I had created a brand new blank account for Gmail/GTalk.  I give Google credit as there were no survey’s or forms that requested personal data.  I now see why.  To get me target so tightly like that, they had to have scanned and indexed either or both my email and chat.  Remember I had only used this account for a day and only with my friend the scrapbooker.  Here is what Google says in their FAQ about saved chat logs

As with all major IM services, Google Talk will collect certain log information created in the course of a conversation. This information is for Google’s internal use only, to maintain statistics on usage and to improve our service and the user experience. We do not permanently store any personally-identifying information in the Google Talk logs.  Google Talk FAQ 

Google does mention targeted ads in their description of GMail

Are there ads in Gmail?

Yes, there are small, unobtrusive, and relevant text ads alongside your Gmail messages, similar to those on the side of Google search results pages. The matching of ads to content is a completely automated process performed by computers. No humans read your email to target the ads, and no email content or other personally identifiable information is ever provided to advertisers.

Again, to Google’s credit, they have at least documented this.  But just like the pay-per-post discussion does this make it right?  After the loss of data by AOL last year, do we know what is and is not being recorded here?  Its great that they might be of interest and relevance to me and that particular conversation, but at what cost?