Gmail + Talk Spying On Me?

I like Google Mail, but I don’t use it as my main email account. I only use it for mailing lists and things I don’t want my main mail account to touch, but now it’s become a bit obtrusive… Before I begin I must say I do use Google Talk, not very often, but often enough to warrant it open alongside MSN for most of the day…

Now I’m not so sure ever since Google added the Talk part to Gmail, even if I’m not signed into Gtalk, Gmail will do that for me, against my wishes, even though I just opened Gmail to delete a spam email. If I wanted to be marked as online and available to chat, I would have opened up Gtalk, so I consider that a shade obtrusive.

Mark O’Sullivan has had the same thought as me it seems…

This GMail thing has me spooked. As soon as I saw that people from Google Talk were there in my sidebar, I wanted to sign out immediately. I’m actually not a fan of messenger tools at all. I prefer using Email because I can do it in my own time and no-one expects an immediate response. But if I’ve got a group of people signed into gmail who can see that I’m also signed into gmail, they might want to start a chat with me, and I honestly don’t want that.

No offense to the people in my buddy list, but I love the anonymity of a web browser. I love that I look at things online, but there aren’t people looking right back at me through their web browser. I don’t mean to get into a semantic discussion about IP tracking and using cookies to monitor web activity. I’m talking about a simple, “Oh, hey, Look at GMail: Nav’s online.”

I never really thought about it til just now when I tried to find a way to stop it (there is a link placed way down at the bottom of the page in a pretty small font). This kind of thing shouldn’t be active by default, should it?