Google is Pooping in Your House
A while ago, I made the switch from Gmail to Hey. I ended up switching for a lot of reasons, but what started my search was the growing discomfort of the business model that I was participating in.
That model was: Sharing all of my emails from friends, family, Amazon, doctors, and more for an email service.
And I just… didn’t feel good about it. For one, none of the people that email me from non-gmail accounts consent to that. I don’t have a big warning that says “anything you send me will be read by Google’s software, summarized by its AI, and kept forever. If you send me a receipt, it goes on a list of everything I’ve ever bought. Google promises not to use any of it for ads or to train that AI, but the promise lives on a policy page they can rewrite whenever they want.”
Would people still choose to email me? Probably not.
The second reason I didn’t feel good about my relationship with Gmail was because that just is not how normal business operates. Like… it just isn’t. The only other agreement that I have like that in my life is with my dog because he doesn’t understand money:
“I will let you live in my house and feed you if you promise not to bite my tiny humans or go poop or pee inside.”
That is a normal agreement between a human and a dog and is not a normal agreement between a human and an email service.
Interestingly, if your work pays for Google Workspace (which mine does), you get a contract instead of a policy page. Google has to put in writing what it will and won’t do with your data, and you can actually read it. That is… oddly… reminiscent of normal business. It is just an excellent service that we are happy to pay for every month.
Fun fact: Google stopped using Gmail content for ads in 2017. Privacy wasn’t the reason. Businesses didn’t want to buy the paid version of a product whose free version read your mail for ads. Even Google knew the deal was weird.
Surveillance Capitalism
I have heard the term Surveillance Capitalism before, but I kind of always thought it was related to Palantir and other dystopian tech companies out of a George Orwell novel. I did not know that I was an active participant by being a Gmail user. Facebook, Instagram, Google Maps, Chrome, and even some weather apps operate with the same business model as Gmail where they give you something pretty dang good in exchange for something that is free for you to give away, but valuable to them. So that is really what we are talking about here and would have been a much more boring title.
But isn’t this actually a good deal for users?
Maybe. It depends what you value.
Companies like Meta earn about $57.03 per user a year in ad revenue and roughly 5 times that in the US & Canada. Apparently selling your phone number goes for as little as 12 cents but location and health information is more. 12 cents! Can I buy my own phone number back to stop all of these spam calls and text messages? To me, it isn’t really the dollar amount. It is just the fact that parts of me are being sold at all.
But it gets so much weirder
If you thought your phone number being worth 12 cents was weird, buckle up. A study by MIT in 2019 asked users how much they would need to be paid to forego the use of certain services and the results kind of blow my mind:
- Search engines: about $17,500
- Email: about $8,400
- Maps: about $3,600
- Social media: about $300
Personally, you would have to pay me $300 to use Facebook, but people on average needing $8,400 to give up email is a bigger number than I imagined! Most people will happily tell you how much they hate email!
So if you are an American, your data earns them $300-ish per year, but you would need to be paid $8,400 to give up email.
That is $8,100 of value you are getting for free! Turns out, selling your data is a great deal! Who saw that twist coming?
A False Dichotomy
Fine. That is a good deal if your only choices are to give up email entirely or to use Gmail in exchange for your personal information, but those aren’t the only options. There are dozens of providers that offer email for $5-10 per month. If it were the only choice, I would probably pay $8,400 to keep using email, since so much of my work runs on it. But… it isn’t the only choice.
Final Thoughts
The good news is if you want to stop participating in surveillance capitalism, there are tons of cool apps that are either open source or inexpensive and are most importantly - great software.
And if you do want to keep participating in surveillance capitalism, at least now you know that you are worth $300 more than you thought.