I love the GMail Mobile app; it’s a fast and easy way to read Gmail on my phone. 

However, it’s worth knowing that GMail Mobile rewrites all web links in email messages, rerouting the web session through a Google proxy server. This has serious privacy implications but doesn’t appear to be documented anywhere in the terms of service or privacy policy. 

Links in an email message are rewritten to point to a Google proxy server which intercepts and reformats not only the destination page but all subsequent pages as well.  (You’ll notice Google’s “Page adapted for mobile phone” link at the bottom of each page.) Hits to the proxy server could be logged and mined either by Google or by any agency that has legal authority over Google. (Given the lack of a formal privacy policy, I have no idea what they actually do with the data.)

The intent by Google is clearly laudable– they want to reformat fat web pages to be more web friendly, and to do so throughout the users session. Even from a practical standpoint, however, this isn’t always what the user wants– the user’s existing cookies for a site aren’t available, and the reformatting prevents some sites from working well. 

Add on the privacy concerns and this is clearly a feature that users should be warned about and given the option to disable.

I’ve written Google about this issue via their customer support form, but I haven’t heard back from them; hence I repost it here.