I did not notice, but the Gmail settings page now has a “labs” tab. Labs, in the tradition of Google, are projects that are ready for public use, but not really ready to be full fleged Google applications. In Gmail, though, the labs applications seem to be roughly analogous to Firefox add-ons: applications that add small, specific bits of functionality.

With that background, I present The Google Goggles. Most of us have been on the receiving-end of a drunk-dialed phonecall, drunk-mailed email, or worse, a drunk-posted blog post. Mail Goggles aims to save us from sending drunk-mails of our own. The application is set to be active at certain times, like between midnight and 6am on Saturday and Sunday mornings. While active, any emails you try to send are held until you successfully answer some simple math questions. If you’re too loaded to answer, the email is stored until you have a chance to re-read it later, and maybe change your mind about sending it.

This application is real. Just to prove it to you, here’s a screenshot I took from my Gmail:

This is pretty funny, but I think it hints at something pretty significant: as we invest more and more of our lives in digital systems — systems that never forget and allow for easy duplication of content — what kinds of safeguards should we have to protect us from ourselves? Should these safeguards be optional or mandatory? And what about the people who just don’t get it?

I’ve seen some pretty scandalous stuff posted to facebook, often without the courtesey of tagging the incriminated person in the photo so that they are aware that they’ve had “that picture” posted online. It will eventually be easy enough for the software that we use to recognize that certain behaviours (or pictures, continuing with the facebook example) are outside of the norm, and should be screened (like what is currently done with abnormal credit card transactions) — but will people accept (or embrace, or reject) similar “safety features” in other areas of their lives?