Even if it weren’t free companies would likely have moved towards collecting data. Just look at how the price tag of cars doesn’t protect you from not being a product.
From its start, Gmail conditioned us to trade privacy for free services
Submitted 7 months ago by freddy@lemmy.one to privacyguides@lemmy.one
Comments
stardust@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Only fix is to end these companies, build an open future.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Hey member when they drove around and sucked up everybody’s wifi and (where possible) password? And then they were like “oh well if you don’t want us to use your network in our data then it’s on you to keep it out” member that.
Yeah.
stoly@lemmy.world 7 months ago
“Security” idiot bro they hired at a bank* I used work for would drive around with a laptop and his buddies to break into WiFi as a hobby. It was truly disturbing, but he was an entitled ass so maybe not surprising.
*Silicon Valley Bank if you were curious.
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Wardriving, wonder what one would find today
doc@kbin.social 7 months ago
I never removed "_nomap" from my SSID. I doubt they even care about it anymore.
toynbee@lemmy.world 7 months ago
It should always have been opt-in, not opt-out. I remember ranting about it to my girlfriend at the time. I don’t think she cared.
gapbetweenus@feddit.de 7 months ago
But they also offered a really good product, especially when it came to spam filter compared with other email services at that time.
cucumber_sandwich@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Also amount of storage. When Gmail first launched it offered a gig of storage or so, while other email providers did 10 megabytes or so.
gapbetweenus@feddit.de 7 months ago
Absolutely, now it’s the standard but limited email storage space was rather standard.
snooggums@midwest.social 7 months ago
Were the other free emails like hotmail selling user data?
Was there a reason to assume google was doing it differently than other email providers before they were caught selling user data?
No, user agreements don’t count because we all know nobody reads those things and they can change at any time.
BolexForSoup@kbin.social 7 months ago
I don’t think that’s a very fair assessment. We are a lot more aware of what “free“ is now. We weren’t informed consumers.
I also think more than ever people are now questioning what free means. So I’m not really sure how we are conditioned to trade for free when more than ever people are questioning it and adopting things like VPNs and adblockers to reassert their privacy.
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
While 52% of Americans said they use an adblocker, which is up 18% from a 2022 analysis by Statista, that figure grew to 66% for experienced advertisers (those with five or more years of ad experience).
via Ghostery
Yuge numbers!
BolexForSoup@kbin.social 7 months ago
I might’ve misremembered it then! Probably 25% of internet users. It was from the “enshittification” defcon talk
Poutinetown@lemmy.ca 7 months ago
And the company came under fire again in 2018 after The Wall Street Journal revealed it was allowing third-party developers to trawl users’ Gmail inboxes, to which Google responded by reminding users it was within their power to grant and revoke those permissions.
So you can remove those permissions, just that it’s enabled by default. Shitty design, but it’s not mandatory to enable those, just like how you are not forced to use edge when you get a Windows computer.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 7 months ago
You kind of are forced to use Edge though. There are certain functions via which Edge and only Edge will always launch. F1, the help button, is bound to a function that launches Edge anywhere in Windows Explorer, so you have a hotkey that cannot be rebound.
The only way you can prevent it from launching Edge is either to intercept the keystroke with AHK or similar, or remove Edge in an unsactioned manner that requires deep system fuckery. There are other links within the system settings dialogues that do this too.
At that point I’d call it mandatory.
melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Unless you want to fix your computer abd clean the windows off.
massive_bereavement@kbin.social 7 months ago
I'll blame the early internet. So often stuff was for free, either due to the dot com bubble or just because someone wanted to create something.
More than ever the second one.
I mean, there were pages full of flash video games and animations with that sole purpose, no ulterior intentions.
When google came around, it too seemed amother neat free thing.
stoly@lemmy.world 7 months ago
And they also had a “don’t be evil” slogan that existed until the founders stepped away. Google pretty immediately went to build the great firewall of China so the free ride was over a long time ago.
gregorum@lemm.ee 7 months ago
So much of the early internet was free because we all had so much trouble convincing anyone that it was worth investing in or even paying for. I mean… people hardly noticed it was there, seeing it was difficult and expensive, and developing what we now know as the internet was at least a decade and a trillion dollars away. Oh, and, no one believed in it or thought it was worth it. Everyone needed convincing.
This was 1995
melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee 7 months ago
The internet wasnt built after 2005; by 2005 it was already dying.
DigitalDruid@lemmy.sdf.org 7 months ago
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Neat (Wiki)