Remember? If something is free, you are the productâ€¦ – Google proves it

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Remember? If something is free, you are the productâ€¦ – Google proves it

March 18, 2014 Leave a commentPrivacyBy Roger Halbheer

Remember my post back in November? If something is free â€“ you are the product! â€“ Now I read an article today, which completely proves this point. It is about Google being sued for scanning student emails. The really interesting thing is this quote:

Of course it’s not news that Google reads the emails in its users’ inboxes. The consumer Gmail product is free and pays its way with targeted advertising. The targeting is done by building up profiles of users’ interests based on the content of their email.

But now they seem to do it for students in their K-12 offerings. It seems that we accept it that a free provider of something breaches our privacy (at least from a European point of view). Now they are in the US in hot water regarding students. It will be interesting to see, when we start to get ready to pay a small fee for getting a service â€“ and protecting our privacy.

Read yourself: Google sued for data-mining students’ email

Well, I pay already

Roger

Google Seeking To Keep Depth Of Gmail Scanning Confidential (marketingland.com)
Google Under Fire For Data-Mining Student Email Messages (mukeshbalani.wordpress.com)
Lawsuit Alleges That Google Has Crossed A ‘Creepy Line’ With Student Data (huffingtonpost.com)
Google Under fire (graysprojectinthemix.wordpress.com)
EU privacy rights derided in land of the free access (irishtimes.com)
France’s Privacy Regulator Imposes Fine on Google (hubshout.com)

About the author

Roger Halbheer

Roger Halbheer is an Executive Security Advisor at Microsoft in EMEA acting as a trusted advisor to CxO. Before that he was a Managing Director at Accenture's Financial Services. Before joining Accenture, he was the Chief Security Officer of Swisscom (Switzerland's largest telecom provider) and the global Chief Security Advisor for Microsoft.