Subverting Gmail’s adstream

Well, well. Just came on this exciting report.

Cambridge UK startup Rapportive has released a Firefox and Chrome extension that will replace the ads in your Gmail with photos, biographic data and social media links, including a live display of recent Tweets, for whoever you're corresponding with by email. It’s fantastic and takes about 2 minutes to set up.

Sounds good, eh? But

You don’t need to give Rapportive your Gmail credentials, the service asks you to login via secure Google Federated Login, or OpenID. The startup doesn’t have access to your password, but it does access the contents of your email – that’s how it builds a service for you to use. Any browser extension has access to everything you do on the web, but I expect some people will feel a little nervous about installing a webmail related extension from a small company. I don’t think that concern is warranted enough to justify missing out on this awesome service.

Oh yeah?