[mike-cardwell]

"Who wants a future in which several (not just one) profitable companies can access your e-mail and analysing it blazing fast?"

It's all about choice. If I want to grant some organisation access to all, or a subset of my email, then that's fine. It's up to the individual what they want to share and with whom.

[randallsquared]

It's going to take a long time, though, before it really sinks in to the general population that you cannot reliably remove access to data. In the interim, we'll continue to have lots of hand-wringing and legal flailing about, which makes this whole space uncertain for companies too large to move offshore and too small to throw lobbyists at the problem.

[mcav]

It may take a while to sink in, but even if it does, the general public probably won't care enough to change their behavior. People want instant gratification; they'll see it at most as a gamble: "What are the odds that this company will do something wrong with my data?"... or at worst, they'll just ignore the risk of consequences completely, like many people do in daily life.

[prodigal_erik]

Which of course is the wrong question. The right question is "what are the odds that someone will acquire this company so that they can do something wrong to all its users?"

[randallsquared]

I actually assume that expectations will change, rather than behavior. People who grow up in a world where it's obvious that anyone who cares to can find out almost anything about them and their life will simply stop having any expectation of 20th-century-era privacy. The middle ground between secret and public is shrinking fast, and I think it will mostly cease to exist soon.

[mike-cardwell]

This is true. Not being able to completely "unshare" data is not something people generally consider before sharing.

[loup-vaillant]

Most likely it will not be up to the individual.

First, the individual will chose the default 80% of the time just because it's the default. Second, granting access to your data is irreversible: once a company has read it, you can't make it forget. It's no longer your choice.

But you didn't answer the real question: would you willingly grant access to your e-mail to a profitable company? Do you know anyone who would?

[mike-cardwell]

"would you willingly grant access to your e-mail to a profitable company"

That's not a yes/no question. I would grant some companies some level of access to some of my email some of the time.

One example: I might grant a spam filtering company read access to the contents of my "Junk E-Mail" folder in exchange for being able to use their black list. Subject to privacy policy contents as always.

[bmelton]

I think the obvious answer there is 'Yes'. Most people I know have their email accounts through GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL or what have you. Those companies are profitable, and their customers rely on them to host their email entirely outside of their own, individual control.

Regarding your other point, the thing to note here is that these are separate services, which you would have to subscribe to in order to get them into your inbox. That's not to say that Google won't ever co-opt these features into GMail, but at least in the current, there's no 'default' option to allow my Inbox be accessible to some foreign party.

[loup-vaillant]

Ah, you caught the catch. Indeed, remote, centralized accounts are nearly universal. But I wonder if people actually realize the direct consequence: their provider has access to their e-mail.

For instance, when I say to people that Google is performing semantic analysis on their e-mail, many are surprised, if not appalled. And the fact that no human is looking at the results doesn't reassure them much.

[bmelton]

Do you also tell them that every email provider worth their salt is performing some sort of analysis on their mail?

It's not particular to Google. Google didn't invent mail routing, or spam filtering, or any of the other reasons that people would be scanning my mail. Hotmail, Yahoo, et al have been doing it since far before GMail was even a product.

[loup-vaillant]

Oh yes I did. But I admit I put the emphasis on Google because of their "Big Brother" aura. From there, it's easy to talk about the dangers of centralized e-mail in general.