I was a fan of gmail until recently one of my friends pointed me to a site which unleashed the intents of google behind providing email.
And why will not anyone become a fan of gmail, after all they are providing 1GB of storage space for free and so many added features. And on top of that having a gmail account means you had received an invitation and belong to that elite class @gmail.com, huh!!
Did anyone give a thought about why google is providing 1GB of storage space for free? Well until I read the article pointed by my friend, I never gave a single thought to it.
As we all know whenever it comes to searching something on net, we look at https://google.com. And actually people say that ’’why don’t you google it’’. The term google has become synonym of search.
Lets get into some technical details. Whenever one googles some information, google installs a cookie on the computer and it identifies the machine uniquely. So every search done is associated with some cookie. Google maintains a database of these searches and they have not deleted this information since they launched google. Quite amazing.
There are companies dying for the user information and what these users are searching for. Google had all the search information but they could not relate it to users. So the great idea stuck and google come out with gmail. On the same line of google search, gmail also installs a cookie on your machine and it associates itself to the google search cookie. So now whatever search is performed on a machine gets associated with a particular user. A great idea indeed.
Result is google maintains the database of searches and can associate them with the users. And if you look into the gmail privacy page information, they have kept a clause whereby they can reveal this information to a third party. Anyone from FBI to companies will give a dear for getting this information from google.
Well all this made me sick, but still I am using gmail, after all it provides 1GB storage space. But there are many more bad consequences of using gmail and one can refer https://gmail-is-too-creepy.com.
Hope it makes some effect.