Short of the dollar itself, few things are more valuable to businesses than data.
As it'd be almost impossible not to notice for any internet user, Google has been making move after move to secure their place in the data dominance space. From strategic acquisitions to functional & tracking changes - the cross-system data they're able to tie together is getting bigger and bigger; and access to that data outside of their company is getting more and more limited.....
Between their search data and today's BI tools alone, you'd be amazed at how accurate predictive models are becoming -- but unless you're a statistician or a big Minority Report fan, that's for another topic.... nonetheless, you can imagine that if we were already able to translate search behavior into other behaviors, what introducing all the youtube and Google+ social data into the mix can do.
But word, IF you're somebody that puts a lot of stock into privacy/etc., you should consider switching from gmail to something else.
All images that come across Gmail will now be stored and served up from their proxy servers....
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/1...w-showing.html
...as with so many things, there is a value add to end-users in that they will not need to deal with the "show insecure items from this email sender?" messages when they include pictures/etc. (which they had in place to make sure people didnt unknowingly download malicious content like viruses)....
i'm not even getting into their intent here, i'm in the space, data is money and money is business and business is business... i don't even concern myselfwith the privacy piece anymore; it's too late for me (and most of us) and fortunately i do not have too much to hide -- but i DO care about the impact a 'monopoly' on digital data would have.... and this is just the latest of many steps in order to get there...
If you don't care about any of this --- awesome! i only care enough to translate what 'new features' really are for those who do. :)
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