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.
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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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 it is an outdated protocol which is a privacy nightmare even without big tech usurping it.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?
~~SMS~~
~~Facebook~~
~~Telegram~~
~~WhatsApp~~
~~Signal~~
~~Session~~
~~XMPP~~
~~Matrix~~
We still use email because it's ubiquitous. Boomer to Zoomer, everyone has at least one email address.
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I was listening to a Linux podcast and one of the people on it said that their partner didn't mind adverts and didn't mind their data being mined because it meant that the adverts were more appropriate. I was absolutely stunned, I didn't think anyone, for one moment, would actually think like this. I had to have a sit down after hearing that. 😅
If I were to ever see an advert on my computer or phone, I would immediately flip out and have to go searching to find out how it got there (though admittedly this never actually happens).
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People forget how expensive just basic email was until Gmail was released in 2004.
Free / included with every internet I had since 1999… when was it even moderately expensive?
Thereby tieing you to your ISP forever unless you were willing and able to keep changing your email address.
Never. Use. Your. ISP's Included. Email. Service.
My 20 year old Steam login uses a defunct ISP email from the dial up days. I changed the actual email associated with it for passwords etc. but my login is still “[email protected]”
But the point I was trying to make is email has always been free or included, in my experience. The fact Gmail was free was never the draw imo.
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We were warned, too.
It was never not creepy and wrong.
NEVER. Just because it's been two decades of people not thinking about it doesn't change that.
I remember, at that time, I was more worried about how admins in my local ISP spend their time than some far away company.
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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.
Hence caveat emptor. Research your company. I can say that the online services I pay for don't gather my data and don't sell it either. And they hold no leverage over me, the second they do any of those things I would drop them like a sack of potatoes.
Gmail wasn't even the first, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, there were tons of free email offerings, even sites that would host your whole website for free like geocities. Gmail came into the market when 3rd party email being free was already well established. They just followed an Apple style of development, taking something that already exists and made a better version of it. Also back then their motto was still "Don't Be Evil" and they mostly still kept to it, so they used that goodwill and the better user experience to grow it at a massive rate. And for the most part, its still the best experience for email for many cases.
The main advantage of Gmail at the time was honestly that they did away with tiny mailbox sizes and attachment limits.
The web UI was also vastly superior to Hotmail or Yahoo
And they blocked way more spam
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I was under the impression that Google was giving me email out the kindness of their own heart.
When Gmail first came out 20 years ago (as of yesterday), we all thought that. It was a new world and nobody was thinking about the long term ramifications. Before that point, there wasn't even such a thing as a Google account, Google was just a search engine that didn't operate all that differently than Duck Duck Go does today.
I don't even think that Google had a plan at that point in the game. Monetization was the obvious goal, but nobody really thought about what that would look like.
Since then, Google users' privacy has experienced death by a thousand cuts. If the terms you have to agree with today were known then, Gmail never would have succeeded.
With every new product and feature added to a Google account holder's toolbox over the past two decades, creeping normalization came with them, and here we are today...
Exactly. Same as is happening with privacy right now. Chip away bit by bit. Do it all at once and people will complain. But do it bit by bit and they won't know until it's too late.
Similarly to the story of the frog in the boiling water. Drop it in hot water and it'll jump out. Heat the water slowly and it'll boil to death.
But hey. At least we've got nothing to hide right? /S
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You say that ironically, but in the early days of Google its motto was "Do No Evil" and it promoted non-intrusive advertising. There was this sense that Google was a company of engineers and that you could trust them.
(disclaimer: I didn't trust them.)
Google was a company of engineers that you could trust, however, like Boeing (which was another "Company of Engineers") they were slowly replaced by business execs who probably haven't written a line of code in their life (Save for maybe some VBA for some businessy excel spreadsheet)
The execs don't know wtf VBA is. Those are the middle managers, at best.
This is why I love FOSS products. You get the advantage of using well engineered code, without the risk of that code falling into the hands of exploitive capitalists.
Permissively-licensed stuff (e.g. MIT, BSD) still has that risk. What you really want is copyleft (e.g. GPL) specifically, not just FOSS.
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Just imagine if they hadn't taken this approach. We might be paying for services and still not getting any privacy.
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.
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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..
Paying for services and still not getting any privacy is largely a result of the equally naive attitude that a paid product is superior to a free one.
In reality neither free nor paid is an indicator of quality and a lot of the time enforced regulations are the only thing that can really prevent a company or organization from putting its own self-interest over that of the customer whenever possible (even though some companies and organizations might do so even without being forced to).
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.
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