01.04.2024 14:09 Uhr, Quelle: Engadget

From its start, Gmail conditioned us to trade privacy for free services

Long before Gmail became smart enough to finish your sentences, Google’s now-ubiquitous email service was buttering up the public for a fate that defined the internet age: if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. When Gmail was announced on April 1, 2004, its lofty promises and the timing of its release reportedly had people assuming it was a joke. It wasn’t the first web-based email provider — Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail had already been around for years — but Gmail was offering faster service, automatic conversation grouping for messages, integrated search functions and 1GB of storage, which was at the time a huge leap forward in personal cloud storage. Google in its press release boasted that a gigabyte was “more than 100 times” what its competitors offered. All of that, for free. Except, as Gmail and countless tech companies in its wake have taught us, there’s no such thing as free. Using Gmail came with a tradeoff that’s now commonplace:

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