New Gmail Feature Creates Concern Over User Privacy

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New Gmail Feature Creates Concern Over User Privacy

Google’s Gmail has come up with a new feature that appears to be a threat for users’ privacy. According to this feature, users would be able to receive emails from the people with whom they haven’t shared their contacts.

New Delhi: This feature of Google will increase the contacts list by including their existing contacts’ email addresses along with the Google+ social network users. As an effect, a user would be able to send email to anybody in Google+ who need not to be the user’s friend.

In an attempt of publicising the Google+ social network containing a 540 million users along with the other services of Google, it has come up with such an announcement. When a user sign up for the Gmail service, he’d automatically be given with a Google+ account.

However, Google says that it has given an option to get away from this feature. The users who do not wish to receive emails from the Google+ people, they can change their settings in a way to receive the messages from the people who are already added to their network by themselves.

But the privacy advocates have something else to say. For them, Google should have provided the new feature as an opt-in feature to the users which would be activated only when they accept it, not an automatic activation as it is now.

Google had to say that this new feature will not expose the Google+ users email addresses any unknown person. Instead it clarified that the email messages from the unknown persons would be routed to separate section within the mail box which will contain the email messages from unknown contacts. These messages will be blocked by Gmail in the future if they’re not replied back by the user.

At the same time, this feature seems to have an exception for the Gmail accounts of celebrities. Their accounts would not receive emails automatically from the unknown users, says the Google.