I haven’t written much about privacy on this blog, despite often behaving, by some people’s standards, like a paranoid schizophrenic where my data is concerned. Until fairly recently I used to run a rooted phone with XPrivacy installed, which is about as private as you can get without ditching smartphones altogether. These days I’ve gone back to a stock un-rooted phone, partly because Android permissions have improved (although you do have to be careful with apps targeting older APIs), and partly because rooting is more risk and burden to me as a user. Also, some apps actively attempt to block rooted devices for quite legitimate (if, I would argue, misguided) reasons.

Anyway, I could go on for hours about Android privacy, but the subject of this post is Gmail. We all know that Google mines your personal data for targeted advertising purposes. But when giving data to companies, there’s a balance between functionality that is useful to you, and commercialising your data for purposes that, often, are not in your best interest.

While Gmail was once an innovative service, I’d argue that the scales have long been tipped in favour of commercialisation, and that today the data cost of Gmail outweighs its value as a service. Continue reading →