From its start, Gmail conditioned us to trade privacy for free services
From its start, Gmail conditioned us to trade privacy for free services
If Gmail proved anything, it was that people would, for the most part, accept any terms of service. Or at least not care enough to read the fine-print closely.
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.
Yes, it was 1GB so you never had to delete anything.
And their slogan was "search dont sort" googles search box was very advanced at the time compared to the free alternatives
I remember the counter too. The ever growing available capacity of my mailbox that was more space than I could ever use. Just open Gmail and watch that number grow
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
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.)
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 :)
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).
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.
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 member!!
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.
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
I don't think paying will solve anything. Some genius will one day just think "but what if we just charged more. But what if we made our service worse so they pay more to restore it. But what if we just merge with even shittier people so they can do all this shitty stuff."
It's never enough, it will never be enough. It's self hosted and open source or barbarism.
Self-hosting was always the intent. Open source ended up being a bonus. People 30 years ago wouldn't understand why something like facebook would even need to exist. The internet is designed so literally everyone can have their own website.
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.
I still remember being a young kid (11-12) and running a program to scan my local ISP in my small town (back then small ISPs could easily get government grants and become a monopoly) for insecure SMB servers or something. I suddenly got a flood of results like
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/private/passwords.txt
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/administrator/USD###-users.txt
All kinds of tasty things. Very excite. Then the results started pouring in by the thousands...
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YOU-ARE-VIOLATING-CFAA
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FBI-DOORBELL
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FIRSTNAME-LASTNAME.EXE
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PWN3D-LMAONOOB
Things like that. I immediately shut my computer down and that was probably the first time my dad saw me not eat for a day. Didn't ask why I wasn't sleeping much the week after that 😄
Also I Googled for the filenames and found nothing. So if you're the 50-70 year old who wrote that script and happen to see this, I'd love to get a message with the ISP name. They are in a number of small-medium size towns around my hometown now.
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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?
Yeah it has always been free for me too.
I think the major thing Gmail brought to the table was 1GB+ email storage when most free options at the time it was 1-5MB or so. I remember it being an insane increase in the available storage.
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.
Not if you set it up properly.
You can have your email hosted by Gmail or Outlook and still get flagged as spam if you don't complete the exact same set up requirements. (SPF, DKIM, etc)
I have my own email server and they don't block me AFAIK. I need to test more anyways
We were warned, too.
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
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.
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.
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 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.