I'm usually surprised by the depths of cynicism I find at large corporations, not by their altruistic goody-two-shoes-ness. Google would be remiss if it wasn't

I'm usually surprised by the depths of cynicism I find at large corporations, not by their altruistic goody-two-shoes-ness. Google would be remiss if it wasn't trading against the massive wealth of data it has. They're probably not mining email (though they could use a proxy and look at the frequency of particular ads' being displayed in Gmail), and probably have a privacy line, somewhere, that they're unwilling to cross. But I'd be surprised if most people ended up being comfortable with that line's placement. And it's not like we have any way of knowing where it is.