My point is that if you don't like Gmail ads, you should investigate switching to something else. I feel like many people are uncomfortable with the ads but might feel locked in.
I actually don't care that Google is machine-reading email to serve ads (see http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/), but I do care about polluting the interface with ads that look like email for the same reason I don't like the new compose interface. Both make the interface worse, and email is bad enough as it is without bad UI.
With what? I _do_ care about running random plugins in my browser that update in the background. There's nothing stopping a malicious plugin from scraping stuff out of your email, and I feel like _that_ is a legitimate security concern!
>I _do_ care about running random plugins in my browser that update in the background.
Then turn that function off [1]. There's no more security threat from well-known browser plugins from Mozilla's site than well-known packages from your OS's apt repo. And both are open source.
I actually don't care that Google is machine-reading email to serve ads (see http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/), but I do care about polluting the interface with ads that look like email for the same reason I don't like the new compose interface. Both make the interface worse, and email is bad enough as it is without bad UI.