"Actually, come to think of it, a company like Google, and just recently Yahoo, already "know" the contents of all of your emails since they actively scan through all of them for marketing purposes and to serve up targeted online ads."

Very true. The commercial world is constantly invading our space for advertising purposes. It's a pretty tricky piece of intel gathering - but because they just "tune it" to produce adds ... we ignore it :-)

I would think that if people here start encrypting their messages with software like PGP - it will just attract more attention from "whoever watches all this stuff". PGP was never guaranteed to be perfect - it's just Pretty Good. There's probably ways to crack it.

If you want to keep a secret - tell it verbally to one person that you trust. Anything in a "network" is fair game.

Pete2