Gmail Knows I'm Chinese?

So apparently Gmail knows I'm Chinese. Or so I think. In the past when I log out of Gmail, it will say "Please wait..." Recently, perhaps through some heavy-duty data mining, it told me to "请稍等..." (Chinese for "please wait") instead. I thought that I had turned some settings in Firefox to display Web pages in Mandarin or I revealed through my emails that I'm Chinese - in which case that would be a serious case of privacy invasion, I think.

And all of a sudden, it now speaks to me in English again. I thought it was a mistake on Google's side. Turns out, it is! Another guy (Joe Shaw) who has entries in Planet SUSE's blog aggregator also has a similar problem. Well, mine is seemingly resolved now. Hopefully Joe's get resolved soon too.

Tip: If you are observant, you will see that when you try to login to Gmail's site, the login page is SSL-secured. Once you log in though, the page is not transmitted through SSL. If you want to keep your connection SSL-secured, you have to login with this address https://mail.google.com instead of http://gmail.com

Basically if you specify right at the start that you want SSL connection, Gmail will keep that for you.

2014-06-24 update: In the process of moving my blog, the Chinese characters got corrupted due to improper encoding handling. I shall leave it as it is. Also it seems that the problem Joe Shaw had was of a different nature - he was complaining about spam which is something different.