...In truth, though, it is a creepy, multi¬national company that spies on us, as I found out a week ago after I foolishly left my laptop in the back of a London taxi.
I made some disconcerting discoveries about Google that have left me deeply unhappy about the business practices of this most apparently ‘cuddly’ of corporate giants.
Like 190 million others, I had signed up for Google’s free service Gmail to write and receive emails.
This was a new development for me, replacing Microsoft Office Outlook, which was largely trouble-free but which I found cumbersome to use away from my home internet connection.
Various friends advised me to switch to Gmail, saying it was easy to use and accessible from anywhere. It was simple to set up an account, and at first I barely noticed the advertisements that pay for the service. There is space for eight adverts down the side of the screen on the Gmail page, plus another across the top.
I was bereft when I lost my laptop and absolutely overjoyed a few days later when the taxi driver emerged from the snowed-in wilds of Essex and returned it to me. I immediately emailed friends with the good news.
But within a second of the email being sent, a column of adverts had appeared down the right hand side of my Gmail screen. The adverts offered me the chance to ‘save hundreds’ on a new PC.
A shiver slid slowly down my spine. The adverts were being specifically targeted at me because of what I had written in a private email to a friend. Though I found the discovery deeply creepy, I carried on using Gmail, noticing all the time that I couldn’t write anything to anyone without Gmail offering me comments, suggestions and temptations.
This might just be tolerable when the email is innocuous. But it certainly was not when I recently emailed a lawyer about a difficult and sensitive problem and back came a host of offers advertising various lawyers and help with a legal compromise agreement.
I felt as if I were being stalked and the experience left me with a raft of questions. What does Google know about me? How dare they invade my privacy? And is there a hidden agenda?
A honey-voiced Google spokesman was quick to respond to my call and insisted the adverts were generated not by a human being, but by a computer programme that all servers use to scan emails looking for spam and viruses. And that no information was read or sold to advertisers.
That may be true, but Google does use the content of your emails for commercial gain. It scans your words and searches for key words in the same way it does when you use the Google search engine...
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