| I think privacy needs to be looked at in a different way. There are other averse effects than sacrificing privacy, which is a trade-off one could indeed make for the comfort of Google's services. Another effect is that we are currently slowly moving towards an oligopoly when it comes to internet services. Some are intentional, such as shutting down XMPP federation, leaving us with closed ecosystems (Hangouts, Whatsapp, Skype) if you want to chat with most other friend. Others are more of a side-effect, for instance, it becomes harder and harder to run a small e-mail service, as it becomes more and more of a reputation system[1]. If we want the internet to be open for new competitors and services in the future, it's important that it doesn't become a small set of closed systems. (I am a relatively happy user of Google's services, but I also see the dangers.) [1] If some spammer uses GMail, it's unlikely that Outlook.com will block other e-mails coming from Google's SMTP servers. If that spammer uses Fastmail, the big players don't mind to block SMTP servers for some time. As far as I understand, this is the reason why Fastmail partitions new users together (server-wise). It's less likely five year paying customer suddenly turns into a spammer and you don't want long-term customers to become victims of a spammer, by having their SMTP server blocked. |