A completely free email service offering 1 GB of storage, integrated search capabilities, and automatic message threading? Too good to be true.
At least, that’s what many people thought 20 years ago today, when Google announced Gmail’s debut. To be fair, it’s easy to see why some AP News readers wrote letters claiming the outlet’s reporters had unwittingly fallen for Google’s latest April Fool’s Day prank. Given the state of email in 2004, the prospect of roughly 250-500 times greater storage capability than the likes of Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail sounded far-fetched enough—offering all that for free felt absurd. But there was something else even more absurd than Gmail’s technological capabilities.
It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when forking over all your data to a private company in exchange for its product wasn’t the default practice. Gmail marked a major shift in strategy (and ethics) for Google—in order to take advantage of all those free, novel webmail features, new users first consented to letting the company vacuum up all their communications and associated data. This lucrative information would then be utilized to offer personalized advertising alongside sponsored ads embedded in the margins of Gmail’s browser.
“Depending on your take, Gmail is either too good to be true, or it’s the height of corporate arrogance, especially coming from a company whose house motto is ‘Don’t Be Evil,’” Slate tech journalist Paul Boutin wrote on April 15, 2004.
The stipulations buried within Gmail’s terms of use quickly earned the ire of watchdogs. Within a week of its announcement (and subsequent confirmation that it wasn’t an April Fool’s prank), tech critics and privacy advocates published a co-signed open letter to Google’s co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, urging them to reconsider Gmail’s underlying principles.
“Scanning personal communications in the way Google is…
Read the full article here