Services like the famous anon.penet.fi have been besieged away for a while. But some ISP's like earthlink offer up to 10 additional anonymous email names appended to your real account. They claim it provides no useful outbound or inbound information and should be used as an email name for circumstances where you don't want spam to come back to your regular email. Whether that's actually true or not I've never looked into.

Again, Google presents itself as a gentle giant, defending the user's rights on the web. No word about Google's own never ending appetite on collecting user data. In fact, with its knowledge about the user's behaviour and preferences, Google already collects much more valuable data as those requested by the new laws in Germany.

So, Gmail is everything else than anonymous: It is part of Google's complex behavioural data collection. If Google is really the supporter of internet user's anonymity, they should cut down some of their own serivces.

I think way too much is made in this country of companies making so called "ethical" adjustments to do business in China. The regime in China is fundamentally different from Germany or any other western government. It is a pragmatic government especially when it comes to business and commerce. Germany, like other western governments is engaged in coming up with ill considered policies in a knee jerk response to terrorism threats - real or imagined. China is simply a political anomaly. There is nothing to be gained by disengagement from China. Disengagement and its big brother, Blockade, are favorite weapons of western foreign policy, despite their proven track record of failure. Where has disengagement/blockade ever worked? Cuba? Iraq? It only ends up hurting the common people which it is meant to help and helps the corrupt tyrant governments/elites it is trying to damage. Isolation is the worst foreign policy ever invented by western diplomacy.

It is amazing how otherwise sane people get all snarky about Google's realistic decision to engage with China on China's terms. I think it is infinitely better for Google or any othr company to stay engaged in China as potential agents of long term political change. There is no conflict between that and the decision to shut down gmail in Germany. Unlike the Germans the Chinese government makes no hypocritical loft promises of personal liberty and freedom of expression. It is perfectly legitimate in its authority to make rules according to its own ideology, which does not make a fetish of personal freedom. Germany however does make a big deal about freedom etc and yet is curbing those freedoms. Google is right to step away from that market. Any attempts to equate the two situations are totally inappropriate and hypocritical.