I hate to kick the legs out on your response, but tag, sort and search is different than record, transcribe and index.

In my statement YOU have privacy and increased management capabilities for your voice mail.

In the later example, the one which was suggested Google provide, Google translates your VM to text, then indexes and allows you to sort – and will sell ads next to it.

What I suggested gives users better control over their voice mail box, not exploits them via a FREE service.

And to be fair to Google, I don’t trust most companies – especially those who offer “FREE services” because as a business professional I know there is no such thing.

P.S. We don’t sell “voice mail.” We do however sell VoIP phone systems that come with voice mail capability.

You suggested in the comments of the post that you linked to that the commenter “why not urge your phone provider to develop a simple voicemail management system by which you can tag, sort and search your voicemails?” Let me ask you; how is this unknown provider of voicmemail more trustworthy than Google?

People that complain about privacy and security as it relates to Google always seem to have some motive or conflict of interest. I am not calling in to question your honesty, but a blog hosted on a site that in essence sells voicemail and complains about Google Voice seems to me to be a bit disingenuous.

Any provider of any service that hosts your information and stores it on their servers is a risk. At any time they could start a program that scans email and voicemail and in turn sell that information for the purpose of targeting ads and services. It would not be a stretch at all. All it would take to tie you to a third party ad network that buys data about you and your phone messages or emails from any provider would be a browser cookie.

Is Google targeting ads at me based on my email and voicemail? Yes. I use the service any way because everyone else in the business either already is doing the same thing, want to do the same thing or will be doing the same thing. It’s all about maximizing revenue per user and at the end of the day I rather trust Google as opposed to Verizon or AT&T or Sprint.

I completely agree that advertising has to change, will change and that Google will be a driver.

Even though people have a “choice” most get blinded by FREE. If they really “knew” what they were getting into, I think they’d look at things differently.

I believe that Google and all others have a responsibility to protect those that can’t protect themselves…not exploit them via FREE services.

The old world of advertising – shotgun approach. Doesn’t work. We as consumers don’t allow it.

Google adwords works. I like advertising my services to local folks searching for my keywords. This model makes sense and his beneficial to both advertisers and consumers.

The world is changing and Google doesn’t have all the answers, but apparently some. Better than some of the TV stations that are now advertising shows (soon products) during the show with annoying popups.

The idea of intelligent advertising based on passive queues is pretty darn smart. It isn’t big brother as long as you have a choice.

People do have a choice, though. All of the capabilities of Google Voice (and then some!) are available for a price on a secure server(s) behind the corporate firewall. Free usually has a trade-off. In the case of Google Voice, it might be privacy.

If they want to insert targeted ads to support this, I really do not care. As long as it is as secure as possible I do not mind.