Being critical of something doesn't mean they are a bad company or that one doesn't support their exisitance. My concerns stem from the value proposition and the fact that people don't really understand what/how information is collected/used and the value of that information. The "user" of the so-called "free" service is, in fact, the product being sold. If you're going to pimp me out, at least pay me what I'm worth (in cash or in kind).
The pimp -er media/online company - will always provide as little value as possible to the user while charging the maximum possible amount to the advertiser. That maximizes profit margin. When the user is kept in the dark as to the value of thier personal details, the user can never obtain maximum value for their information.
I worked for many years in a "traditional" media company - uses a similar business model of selling viewers/listeners to advertisers - you'd know who it is instantly. Although we collected whatever data we could, the fact remained that personal info was of limited usefulness for the mass-media offerings (by definition, we couldn't personalize the product). We could never realize the full value potential from advertising because of that - the holy grail was the kind of situation that Google, Apple, Spotify, Facebook, etc have today. Before I left, we were well on the road to creating online services that were sold as "providing services to the user", but were really all about collecting information to sell to advertisers.
So, while you may not care about being identified, classified, and sold, some of us are uncomfortable with a commercial company acting as big brother and brokering that information. Even if it's done by computer, the information is still collected and mined. Having seen, in person, the capabilities of that data mining, I can tell you that on a daily basis I question whether or not it's good for society & mankind. Information is power.
Enjoy Google. Some of us remain cautious of companies (or governments) that know too much about us. I'd rather have some control of my personal information....
I just now had a discussion with a client that's somewhat related to this topic.
Briefly, the client is a wholesaler of certain industrial stuff, and has maybe 25 users with email addresses. The person I deal with there is the owner's son, who recently came of age and took over that end of the business.
The first thing the son did upon arriving was require that all of the users use gmail to collect their mail. They previously had used Thunderbird by default, although they were allowed to use other standard email clients if they preferred.
It didn't take the son long to realize that gmail basically sucks when it comes to handling third-party mail. The biggest problem was that from time to time, there would be delays -- sometimes several hours -- before the external mail was available to be read using gmail.
I suggested to the son that they simply use a regular email client, but he refused. He's a fanboy, and Google can do no wrong as far as he's concerned. His solution was to have his users all create gmail addresses, and then create forwarders to forward their email to gmail; and then the employees would reply from their domain email addresses from within gmail.
The problem with that solution is that it means, firstly, that the users have an extra step they have to go through; and secondly, that they get two copies of every email. A third problem is that from time to time, gmail stops emptying the boxes on the servers for no apparent reason, and they fill up.
Now... I dunno... Gmail is a webmail client, and not a very special one at that as far as I'm concerned. In fact, they're all pretty much the same as far as I'm concerned. I happen to like RoundCube best, in fact, which I provide to all my clients if they want to use it. I really don't get the attraction of gmail. It's neither better nor worse than any of the other dozens of webmail clients out there, in my opinion.
And then there are the privacy issues. Google scrapes all the mail it handles. Now, if he has no problems with that, then I frankly don't, either. But his clients may have a problem with it. I explained this to the son during the hundredth discussion we've had about the question of why there's sometimes a delay of several hours between the forwarded version of an email and the original showing up in his users' gmail accounts.
As a test some time ago, I deleted some users' addresses and just left the aliases in place. The problem with this was that when the users tried to reply through gmail, the sends failed, of course, because the alias wasn't an authenticated user. I was going to try a few things to fix that, but the son told me to just leave the actual addresses and the forwarders in place.
So now his complaint is that the forwarded mail arrives so far ahead of the actual, original email that users sometimes forget they already took care of whatever the email was about.
My advice to the son, as it has been for years, is to use a standard email client. But that's the one solution he won't consider. It has to be gmail. Why, I have no idea.
I'm ready to just put them on Google's mail service altogether, to tell you the truth, just so I don't have to listen to his complaints any more. Let him try to find a living human being at Google the next time he has an email problem.
In the meantime, Lord, save me from the fanboys.
-Rich
