The explosion of the Internet has created a new privacy conundrum. Companies are willing to provide a host of free online services, but the quid pro quo they sometimes ask for is personal information in exchange. Google's new email service with targeted online ads is a case in point. However, we shouldn't let paranoid rhetoric from privacy advocates stop this or other similar types of consumer-friendly services.

One of the wonderful things about the Internet revolution has been the emergence of free email services. Providers like Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft's Hotmail give tens of millions of Americans free email addresses that can be accessed from any Internet-connected computer. For some low-income Americans who access the Internet at places like libraries and community centers, free email allows them an opportunity to have a mail address without paying monthly ISP fees. For many million more Americans, free email lets them establish multiple email accounts for specialized purposes, like shopping.

The costs of establishing these free email services are not trivial. Companies must pay for servers and software, as well as staff to run the systems -- the anti-spam efforts alone require a small army of workers. These companies provide this expensive service at no cost to the consumer the way other media companies provide expensive services like free over-the-air TV or free neighborhood newspapers: they pay for it with advertising revenue. Coming onto the scene now is Google, the Internet search engine company. Google is beta-testing "G-mail", a service that not only provides users with free email, but with 1 gigabyte of storage for their emails, about 250 to 500 times more storage than most other email services provide. Google hopes that such large storage will attract users who want to be able to store many of their emails, including ones with large file attachments, instead of having to constantly delete read email as they must do with services providing less storage space. Providing such large quantities of storage is not cheap, and Google hopes to be able to make money by targeting on-screen ads based on the content of the email message. In other words, if someone emails a friend to set up a weekend round of golf, Google's technology might detect the word "golf" and serve up an ad for an online golf retailer.

In an all too predictable response the privacy advocates are howling in protest. Oh no, companies will be reading your email! Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading organization opposing such e-commerce innovations, worries that "It's a back door to seeing the content of your e-mail, without seeing your e-mail." The reality is much simpler. If companies, either ISP's or free email services, wanted to read your email they could. After all the messages go through their servers. The reality is they all have privacy policies stating very clearly they will not read their user's email nor share it with others. Google's service is no different. Their privacy policy states: "no human reads your mail to target ads or other information without your consent."

Companies follow this practice for a very simple reason: if they didn't consumers would rightly rebel. In Google's case, the email will be "read" by a computer, not a person. Google's text analysis software matches the ad to the content of the email. No person will have read the email. No company serving the ad will know who's sending or receiving the email.

There is no doubt that this represents an innovation in free email services, but Google is doing it for a simple and understandable reason. Giving consumers 1,000 megabytes of storage space is expensive and if they are going to be able to do this, they need to be able to charge the higher prices that targeted (as opposed to randomly generated) ads produce. At the end of the day no one is forcing anyone to sign up for G-mail. Consumers who want the convenience of 1,000 megabytes of storage and don't mind targeted advertising -- which is even less invasive than "tracking cookies" used by services such as DoubleClick -- can choose to sign up for the service. Those that do mind the advertising can choose another service and pay for the storage. If privacy advocates are worried about this, they have a simple choice -- don't sign up for G-mail. But it would be a shame if their paranoid rhetoric shut down Google's new service and denied that choice to the rest of us.