BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. This month, Google, the internet search engine so great it spawned its own verb, announced that it was launching its own free email service, G-mail. With a whopping 1-gigabyte email inbox, it marked a great leap forward in the great email space race. But, before Google could even break open the bubbly, the critics spoke up with some serious privacy concerns. Part of the G-mail deal is that Google gets to scan messages in order to deliver targeted ads with the email. California State Senator Liz Figueroa doesn't like it, and she wrote the company (quote): "I believe you are embarking on a disaster of enormous proportions, for yourself and for all of your customers," and she's not alone. By April 6th, an international coalition of privacy and civil liberties groups also filed a letter to Google, urging it to address the privacy issues. Pam Dixon is the executive director for one of those groups, the World Privacy Forum, and she joins us now. Pam, welcome to OTM.

PAM DIXON: It's a pleasure to be here.

BOB GARFIELD: Okay. There is no free lunch, and we are used to, as Westerners, making a trade between, for example, all the free media that we consume and the advertising that comes with it. It's a quid pro quo, and we've grown to accept that. The deal here is that if you take Google G-Mail, you're willing to accept ads that come to you based on the content of what email message you're sending or receiving. Tell me how it works, and tell me why that frightens you.

PAM DIXON: I wouldn't call it fear. I'd say that a lot of people see that this sets a very troubling precedent. Today, Google is scanning to place ad words, but tomorrow a government may be scanning to find humanitarians and human rights activists in troubled countries. When you sign up for the system, you are agreeing to the policies of G-mail, which is fine. I don't think anyone has a problem with that. The problem is, is that it's not the outgoing mail that has the potential to get scanned. It's all the email that's coming in to that person's account, and that's a significant problem both in the United States in terms of precedent and expectation of privacy. Also, in Europe, where they actually do have a privacy directive -- and Germany has already found, by the way, that they will not be allowing G-mail, because it does violate the law there.

BOB GARFIELD:I'm not unsympathetic with your point of view, but permit me to continue to play the devil's advocate, because has a precedent really been made here, and hasn't Pandora's box long since been opened by scanning technology that weeds out spam or weeds out offensive material in emails? Our emails are already being scanned by our employers and by our internet service providers. How does this significantly up the ante?

PAM DIXON: The first point you made was that there's already a precedent for scanning email in terms of sorting out viruses and spam. And that is true. However, something that I think many people may not realize is that the scanning that occurs currently is of the subject line of the email and of the header information or the addressing information of the email. The full text bodies of emails are not scanned in personal communications. Now, there are some technologies that corporations use for employees that do scan full text. In that situation you have a long history of, you know, lawsuits that really do declare that at this point in time, there is not an expectation of privacy in business communication where you're the employee using the employer's systems. That is a whole different ball of wax. So, just to clarify it, this is really speaking about personal communications, and in personal communications this precedent has indeed not been set at this point for full text scanning.

BOB GARFIELD:We already make privacy compromises in our day to day affairs. I don't know what the number is. It's the tens of millions of Americans who carry supermarket frequent purchaser cards that enable us to get savings at the register, but in exchange we are telling some database exactly what we're purchasing and how often. Privacy is something that Americans have shown that, incrementally, they are willing to surrender if the price is right.

PAM DIXON: It's true. However, I think that there comes a point in time when you need to say, okay, there are certain areas that are really inviolable. If Google instituted this G-mail system tomorrow, these technologies could very much be opened to court order and subpoena, and they could be forced to, to disclose the contents of people's emails that were scanned.

BOB GARFIELD:Now that's the second time you've invoked the notion, the terrifying notion of government's peeking over our shoulders, but in fact, governments already do, using their own technology. In China, for example, internet communication is monitored very tightly by the government and restricted. In the United States Justice Department has Carnivore which can do every bit of what Google is proposing and more with impunity. Why would it have to seek a court order to get some private search engines data?

PAM DIXON: It's not just what they're getting. When you look at the laws that are governing Echelon --the new word for Carnivore is Echelon --they're quite different than what Google is actually pulling in. Google is actually pulling in and correlating much more data than Echelon is right now, so I read one very--interesting and, and actually poignant post when this came out on a, in a very interesting message list, and basically the person said hey, you know, forget about the, you know, the National Security Agency. Let's go with Google. Let's just buy a piece of that. That's the best way to catch terrorists.

BOB GARFIELD: Pam, thanks very much.

PAM DIXON: Oh, thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Pam Dixon is executive director of the World Privacy Forum.