[mseebach]

"The information is there" on all e-mail providers. There is nothing (short of end-to-end encryption) stopping a real person at any e-mail provider from looking at your email.

The interesting distinction (for me, and I have been a happy GMail "customer" for close to a decade soon) isn't the profile, it's the human. I have strong faith that Google can be successful in keeping humans from reading my e-mail (or a computer-generated digest of it, which is what the profile amounts to), and so I don't worry about the existence of the profile.

[darxius]

Not always. Several new security-oriented email providers boast diskless email servers and end-to-end encryption.

[mseebach]

Yes, end-to-end encryption would fix all this, but it would also fix it in OP's satirical mail service, as well as in GMail - so that's really a tangential point.

Trusting that those providers don't start siphoning off a copy of your mail (or are indeed diskless and not out of malice or incompetence actually just using regular disks. Also, being diskless is worthless if they are still keeping your mail around in memory anyway) is no different than trusting Google to keep humans away from my email.