Life on the internet in 2018 is a game of weighing competing values against each other and finding compromises that you can sleep with at night. At least that’s what it is if you’re paying attention. Unfortunately most of us haven’t paid enough attention and have compromised way too much. Some of my values that come into play in how I interact with technology and the internet, in alphabetical order, are:
- Convenience
- Cost
- Open Source
- Privacy
- Security
- Transparency
- Utility
Let’s use email as a case study in this, and while we’ll talk more about email next time, for now we’re going to talk about Gmail.
Convenience – Gmail is ridiculously convenient since it web based, has apps for everything, is compatible with any mail client, stores all of your emails for ever and is just part of having a Google account which you almost have to have to use the internet, or so it seems.
Cost – Gmail is free as in beer. You never have to pay a dime.
Open Source – Gmail is not free as in freedom, yes, it uses a lot of open source technologies, but is a proprietary system and how it works is a trade secret. Fortunately it does use open standards.
Privacy – Google will mostly protect your data from the outside, but they scan all of your email to develop a better picture of who you are so they can show you more relevant ads and make more money. Those sex toys you just ordered on Amazon? Google just scanned the order confirmation email and can now try to sell you more sex toys. Google is also probably scanning all of your email for the NSA and FBI. If the Post Office did that everybody would be up in arms about the US acting like Soviet Russia, but this is email. What do you have to hide?
Security – Google does a good job of keeping your data secure from hackers, but it is a big target for hackers. You’re data is also constantly being scanned so while it’s secure from outside threats, it isn’t secure from Google.
Transparency – Google is open about the fact that they scan all of your email to figure out how to sell you more targeted ads, but that’s about all they’ll tell.
Utility – Gmail is very functional and integrates nicely with the rest of the Google ecosystem. From a utility standpoint, it’s top notch.
If you don’t value privacy, transparency, or open source, then Gmail is great. Keep in mind, that nothing is free. The advertisers are the customer, you are just the product. Running Gmail costs Google a fortune, but it’s highly profitable. Sure, they have to keep adding more and more storage as people archive, instead of delete their email, but if you’ve been on Gmail since 2005, as I have, Google has 13 years of email. Every order confirmation, every Craigslist deal, every job search, every email from your racist aunt, every response from a dating site. Once you add in what they gathered from your search history, YouTube, Docs, and tracking your Android phone, well, Google knows you better than you know yourself and they capitalize on that to sell ads at top dollar because they are targeted specifically for you.
Google’s motto is to do no evil and as long as they use that data for nothing more than selling ads it might be okay, but as time goes on and as they know more and more and more about me, it really bothers me.