One of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes involves aliens who come to earth and begin to solve man’s most challenging problems; pollution, energy, food supplies, etc. A group of 12 scientists and others are charged with translating a book that was taken from the aliens. The finally cracked the title, which read, “To Serve Man”. Ecstatic that these aliens were here to serve us, 10 of the researches boarded a spacecraft, which many humans were doing, to go to the aliens ‘wonderful’ home planet. The two researchers continued cracking the book’s meaning, to find out….it was a cook book!
That’s kind of how some of us may end up feeling about Google’s gmail: Google software scans user e-mails to learn what kind of advertising might appeal to the user.