Long before Gmail was smart enough to finish your sentences, Google’s now-ubiquitous email service was already courting the public in a way that defined its destiny in the Internet age: If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.
When Gmail launched on April 1, 2004, its lofty promises and timing reportedly led people to think it was a joke. It wasn’t the first web-based email provider—Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail had been around for years—but Gmail offered faster service, automatic conversation grouping of messages, integrated search capabilities, and 1GB of storage, which was a plus. It was a huge leap forward in personal cloud storage. Google boasted in its press release that 1GB is “100 times more” than what its competitors offer. All this, for free.
However, as Gmail and the countless tech companies that followed have taught us, nothing is free. Using Gmail comes with a now-common trade-off: You get access to its service, and in exchange, Google gets your data. Specifically, its software scans the content of account holders’ emails and uses that information to serve them personalized ads on the website’s sidebar. For better or worse, it was a groundbreaking approach.
“Depending on how you look at it, Gmail is either too good to be true or it’s corporate arrogance, especially coming from a company whose motto is ‘Don’t be evil,'” wrote tech journalist Paul Boutin. slate When Gmail launched. (Butin, one of its early media testers, applauded Google’s email scanning but suggested the company implement a way for users to opt out, lest they reject it entirely.)
There was immediate backlash from those who thought Gmail was a privacy nightmare, but it continued to grow and generate widespread hype, thanks to its invitation-only status in its first few years, which spurred the resale of Gmail invitations The market reportedly sells for $150 per bottle time. Despite the market heat, Google held on to its ad-related email scanning practices for more than a decade, from Gmail’s public launch in 2007 until the 2010s, when it really started to gain traction.
So why not? If Gmail proves anything, it’s that people, for the most part, accept these terms. Or at least not reading the fine print carefully enough. In 2012, Gmail became the world’s largest email service, with 425 million active users.
Other websites have followed Google’s lead and built similar deals into their terms of service, so that people using the product automatically consent to data collection and designated forms of sharing. Facebook began integrating targeted ads based on users’ online activities in 2007, and the practice has since become a pillar of social media success.
However, much has changed in recent years with the rise of a more tech-savvy public and increased scrutiny from regulators. Gmail users repeatedly tried to file a class action lawsuit over the scanning issues, and in 2017, Google finally gave in. That year, the company announced that it would no longer scan regular Gmail users’ emails for ad personalization (paid business Gmail accounts already did this).
Of course, Google still collects user data in other ways and uses this information to provide highly relevant ads. It still scans email, both for security purposes and to support some of its smart features. In 2018, the company again faced criticism wall street journal After revealing that it allows third-party developers to scour users’ Gmail inboxes, Google responded by reminding users that they have the power to grant and revoke these permissions.as Science and Technology Information Network Reporters Laura Hautala and Richard Neva Google’s response, wrote at the time, more or less boiled down to: “This is what you signed up for.”
In fact, users signed up for a cutting-edge email platform that was built around other services at the time, and in many ways still is. For some, this makes privacy concerns more palatable. From the beginning, Gmail set the bar pretty high with its array of free features. As long as the user has access to an Internet connection and browser, users can suddenly send files up to 25MB and check email from anywhere because it’s not locked to the desktop application.
It popularized the cloud and JavaScript technology AJAX, wired Gmail 10th anniversary article mentioned. This makes Gmail dynamic, allowing the inbox to automatically refresh and display new messages without the user having to click a button. It more or less eliminates spam, filters out spam.
Still, when Gmail first launched, many thought it was a huge gamble for Google — which had already established itself with its search engine. “A lot of people think this is a very bad idea from a product and strategic perspective,” Gmail founder Paul Buchheit said. time Year 2014. “What’s concerning is that this has nothing to do with online searches.”
Things are clearly going well, and Gmail’s dominance will only strengthen further. Gmail passed the 1 billion user mark in 2016 and has since doubled its numbers. 20 years after it first came online, it’s still leading the way in email innovation, incorporating increasingly advanced features that make the process of receiving and replying to email (which, let’s be honest, is a chore for many of us). Horrible daily chores) become simpler. Easier. Gmail may have finally changed the way it collects data, but the precedent it set is now deeply embedded in the exchange of services on the web; companies can harvest as much data as they can from consumers although They can and ask for forgiveness later.
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