Google's Don't Be Evil policy inspired this site. Privacy, conflicts of interest, and the tension between corporate profits and the public trust are at the root of today's most urgent issues in business, politics and the media.

The way Google deals with the controversy over privacy and its new Gmail email service will be watched by many to see if Google can make the jump from the enlightened self-interest of a private company to the demands of a publicly traded corporation.

No sooner did Google announce its new email service as an April Fools Day metaprank, than privacy advocates cried foul over Google's intent to serve context-sensitive ads when email messages are viewed.

The California State Senate passed a bill on Thursday to restrict Gmail. As originally written, the bill would forbid serving ads based on content unless all parties to the email gave their consent -- which could have killed Gmail. The Senate passed an amended version that now requires that no personally identifiable information be retained, that information cannot be transferred to third parties, and that deleted messages must "no longer be obtainable in any retrievable format."

(The amended bill is very short, you can read it yourself in a couple minutes.)

Google is under great pressure to find new sources of content to drive their advertising business. And what could be better at serving billions of pages targeted to a user's immediate needs and interests than personal email?

Prospective investors in the Google IPO will be keenly interested in how this plays out. Ninety-five percent of Google's revenue comes from advertising. In Google's pay-per-click system, Google only earns revenue when a user clicks on an ad -- and many more ads must be served to content pages (such as Gmail) since web search is no longer growing fast enough to drive rapid growth. To justify the incredible valuations that are being bandied about, Google needs Gmail to continue the rapid growth of ad revenues. The limiting factor may not be advertisers willing to buy ads, but available content to serve the ads that have been purchased.

While some of the more radical voices charge Google with serious offenses, most privacy advocates have seemingly simple expectations. But even basic requirements such as rendering deleted messages "no longer obtainable" may be vexingly difficult to achieve in a system with tens of thousands of networked servers spanning the globe. (Google advises users that "residual copies of E-mail may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account.")

More complex and politically charged issues such as wiretapping and law enforcement access to a searchable database of a lifetime of email will be more difficult to sort out.

Gmail has great promise, and is receiving rave reviews from beta testers. The free accounts given by invitation only to early testers are being sold for $50-$90 on eBay, and more exotic payments elsewhere. But Google critics portray Google as an evil Big Brother, and are waging campaigns to stop them at the grass-roots level or through the courts and legislatures.

Google needs to make a compelling case that its Don't Be Evil policy can support a rigorous privacy standard while making a profit. The current privacy policy doesn't go far enough.