Google mail is NOT free. You've sold out your own privacy in favour of having Google scan the content of you emails so they can target advertising toward you, make money from you and potentially keep a record of your activity to sell to their partners who will make money off you.
You've prostituted yourself to Google, how does that make you feel now?
I understand the argument but it doesn't hold up. Your bank tracks how you use your check card. Your TV provider tracks the channels you watch. Your ISP tracks the websites you visit. Your utility company tracks when you use the most power. Etc.
Google's problem is in poorly anonymizing the data soon after they capture it. And doing sociopathic things like assuming you want the people you email most listed publicly as your "friends" when you sign up for their Facebook competitor service. Other companies, especially Apple, but lots of others, are better at the sensitivity issue.
Living "off the grid" has always required effort, whether it be now or back in the 1950s. You can still do it now, but it's that much more of a pain. For example, I don't drive so I carry my passport for ID, figuring, Why do I need to pay for an maintain a state ID? The federal and state government are perfectly fine with this. But do you know how many people in this country have never ever seen a passport? It's like it's some mythical document about which they've heard but they never believed existed. I get all kinds of silly, inappropriate questions from clerks for private businesses. You leave the country a lot? Why do you have to go overseas? Try just using your passport for ID for a month. It's a pain.
Ultimately, unless you plan on starting up a meth lab and using your current resources and communications channels to establish it, these privacy concerns are purely philosophical. Yes, the information could be used against you over licit activities, but as a rule it isn't, and anyway this has been true since we came in from the forests and fields and established population centers. It's all just degree after that.
The relatively few people who've been sacked for Facebook posts? Good Lord, man. Facebook is PUBLIC expression. If you have 20 people from work on your friends list and you cast aspersions on your employer or your boss, that's just like loudly addressing 20 work acquaintances over the same thing in the company cafeteria. Stand on a chair, already. It's dumb conduct. Yet still, Facebook whining happens all the time, and most companies just figure, freedom of speech, blah, blah, we'll ignore it but that guy's an idiot for running his mouth, or keyboard, in public like that.
Better to complain about TSA policy. Maximum intrusion, minimal security. We have to remember the events that sparked all this government intrusion in travel and other areas could have been stopped with the security policies we already had in place. Knives were prohibited aboard commercial aircraft. They could keep anything they wished off the plane. But those guys carried KNIVES aboard planes. 9/11 is on the heads of the security personnel who let those guys on planes with razor-sharp box cutters. Before 9/11 I'd seen dull, useless pocket knives pulled off passengers and packaged for transport in the baggage hold. I've seen, again way before 9/11, flight crews make passengers let the captain keep GOLF CLUBS in the cabin with him, for extra caution.
I'm just saying, there are bigger fish to fry in the area of privacy concerns than whether or not Google knows you have a penchant for cheeseburgers and Brad Pitt movies.
