Lab+5

"if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"

This statement has some validity in it in the sense that if you are committing some sort of crime, you might not want to put that all over the internet and want people to know about your criminal activity. With that said, there is some other things that are personal that you do not want people to know, or things that are unnecessary for other people to know. For example, gmail uses bots to pick out choice words in order to better cater their advertising for you. Well, what happens when I don't want a bombardment of advertising? What if I just wanted to borrow my friend's stellar purple dress and now i'm getting links and junk mail for dress comapnies? In this way I believe my privacy is being broken.

Having someone reading over your e-mails is essentially the same as someone from the government tapping your phone. It feels like your privacy has been invaded. Their should be no reason for anyone to be looking over my e-mails weather it be for something harmless as advertising or something different. It's still an invasion of privacy.

As much as google stands by their slogan of "don't be evil," I think in a way they contradict themselves by subjecting those who use e-mails to watch what they say or do for fear of privacy infringement. This is also a relation to Bentham's Panopticon, where the prisoners were being watched at all times and knew they were being watched but couldn't see who was watching them. Should we be treated like prisoners? I really don't think so.