Just imagine if they hadn’t taken this approach. We might be paying for services and still not getting any privacy.
Good point, except that this, paying for services and still not getting any privacy, is a reality. But maybe your remark was ironic :)
The best dry humor is that which the audience has to assume is meant to be funny, because the alternative is that it’s just the sad reality…
Spot on. There’s no amount of money in the world that would make them not spy on your and use your data for ads and God knows what else.
The only sane alternative is FOSS.
FOSS does nothing if you don’t control the data
Within two years of Gmail going viral people were screaming from the tops of any soap box, tree and mountain You are the product!! but as these things always go, very few people paid attention.
Convenience is above all else
And not just a little bit of convenience. At that time, Hotmail had like 14 MB of space whereas Gmail had 1 GB. Before, you were constantly out of space, whereas Gmail users could keep on going without ever deleting anything.
Would you rather walk if you could have a personal uber driver with a Mercedes? Well, the driver is super creepy, but least the seats are soft. He will take you everywhere for free, but will also know everything about those rides and the conversations you had during them.
Yahoo was the competition as far as space is concerned. Even today, it offers a whopping 1 TB for email.
Remember when we would climb over 10 office desks to try to snatch an invite to this new “G mail” service with a whole Gig of space?
We were literally begging to have them steal all our personal correspondences, bank statements, etc
Even then, Hotmail, Y! Mail and your shitty ISP’s shitty POP mailbox were reading the contents of your emails and selling adverts based on the contents. At least with GMail they gave us the dignity of a nice UI and adequate storage.
At that time I honestly doubt NetZero was scanning my emails to deliver targeted ads. Doing that required hiring teams of engineers to write the software to do the scanning, scoring, and then mapping advertisers to specific customer groups. Its non trivial.
Most ISPs didn’t have the money or the foresight to do that.
I don’t know who NetZero are/were, but a number of UK ISPs were selling email and browser keywords to advertisers in the early aughts, including big players like BT and FreeServe. Some even tried to launch a project that would use DPI to inspect all web and email traffic and dynamically inject ads into email and webpages.
I member!!
And to be fair, they were upfront about it…
The problem now is that 1) Google products turned from innovative to barely functional (with every improvement coming in a soon to be killed new app) and 2) they went from your data to show you ads to profiling people’s fart strength
Now that I think of it, thesgiy e free products also differ from inflation … You get to pay with even more of your privacy for an increasingly shittier product
With the rate of turnover at tech companies, some of their more fundamental legacy offerings are just black boxes at this point.
I believe 100% that to be the case
Okay back in the Don’t Be Evil days, the business model expressed that no human should ever see private data except its owner. Google’s business clients could ask Google questions about data analyses involving cross sections of thousands of users, but couldn’t ask about individuals. Also you could tell Google to send ads to car owners (though normal Google advertising channels) and they would, and report how many users saw your ads.
Then two things became a problem.
One was internal affairs. Not just Google techs stalking their exes but people stealing databases of names and selling them to information collection orgs. So if you were a debt collector, it was good to have a friend in Google.
Also the PATRIOT act, FBI, DHS, NSA and eventually all of US law enforcement. Judges let them look at the raw Google data, which Google actually resisted with a high-powered legal team, but eventually the judges let law enforcement have at, which is how we have reverse warrants fulfilled by Google today.
In the aughts, Google was supposed to figure out a technological solution, so that the police could tap at the computer or look at the (salted) data all they want and without end user keys which no-one could access, they’d be SOL.
But they did too little too late, and nowadays, enough info on one person could narrow then down to a single human being, which John Oliver demonstrated a couple of years ago by building info kits on everyone in the US Senate, including acts of fraud and illicit affairs.
It was a good idea, and still may be if it’s started locked down like Crystal Palace, but Google can’t do it anymore.
The problem is that if you run your own email server at home, you get blocked as a spammer these days. Today, to send emails you MUST use one of the big providers, or your email won’t get delivered half of the times. One has no alternative but to use these free services.
I run a couple small mailservers. It’s still possible.
- Fijxu ( @Fijxu@programming.dev ) 1•7 months ago
I have my own email server and they don’t block me AFAIK. I need to test more anyways
I don’t mind paying for email if it’s actually private. One advantage I found to using Proton Mail instead of my self hosted email server (other than the obvious convenience, config, maintenance, blocked port 25, IP reputation so you don’t end up in spam, etc) is that the more people start to migrate off of Google and onto Proton, the more emails between Proton users will be E2E encrypted by default, so it’s one of those “the more users, the better” kinda things.
Same with Tuta. Even though emails between a Proton and Tuta user aren’t E2E, it’s still a net benefit for everyone if more people switch to these private solutions.
its honestly weird that email is still a thing. it is an outdated protocol which is a privacy nightmare even without big tech usurping it.
What’s the alternative that everyone has and you can make a new one without much issue or privacy infringement?
SMSFacebookTelegramWhatsAppSignalSessionXMPPMatrixWe still use email because it’s ubiquitous. Boomer to Zoomer, everyone has at least one email address.
It’s not outdated. The chance of a newer electronic communication method being ubiquitous and also relatively open (e.g. not associated directly with a company) is slim. PGP encryption (another “old” technology) solves the privacy nightmare piece. People just have to use it.
Also I recommend selfhosting email. Mailinabox.email is pretty brainless.
It’s the only decentralized communication protocol for personal messages that is widely adopted. And yes, it’s a privacy nightmare.
It isn’t surprising that something outdated is still used
In other news, water is wet. Honestly though, people expecting “free” services from big corpos are naive. What do they expect the servers and admins/devs are payed with?
Gmail was initially advertising funded while respecting privacy. It’s a false dichotomy to argue that a service can’t have a free privacy respecting offering. We’ve just become accustomed to accepting targeted advertising as the norm.
It’s a false dichotomy to argue that a service can’t have a free privacy respecting offering.
I don’t believe anyone is arguing that it’s technically impossible. But reality is pretty clear that it’s implausible. Targeted ads reel in too much money.
I think the real fallacy is getting used to services being free at all. You need to pay a monthly fee for basically every utility, but as soon as it’s in the digital world people expect that to change. What makes a search engine or mail provider so much different than your ISP or cable provider? You want competent services that respect your privacy? Pay for alternatives like Kagi and Proton.
It’s not implausible, Proton has a free privacy respecting tier
in 2017, Google finally caved. That year, the company announced that regular Gmail users’ emails would no longer be scanned for ad personalization (paid enterprise Gmail accounts already had this treatment).
Wut
If it’s free from a for profit company, you’re most likely the product
Which today though does not mean that if you pay for something like this that you are not also the product. Double-dipping for companies, so to say.