The popular online e-mail service, Gmail, which we thought is for free, is not free of charge as it collects payment in the form of its users' personal information.
When users send and receive messages using free e-mail services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Microsoft Outlook, their messages will be automatically scanned and filed to obtain information such as their interests, connections, and finances from them. The information collected was then used to know what ads would be relevant to users and flash it to them.
"The basic premise of Gmail is, we'll give you a robust e-mail service and in exchange we want to display ads alongside our e-mail and we're scanning your e-mail to decide what ads are most relevant," said Eric Goldman, a professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law, to CNN.
It's not only the free e-mail services which do such as it has become the primary business model for many technology companies. The social networking sites, like Facebook, and search engines, like Ask and Bing, also use the same strategy to obtain contact and information from its users.
In the last quarter of 2013, Google reported revenue worth $16.86 billion.
"Nothing in life is free, and as a result it is important for people to understand what value they bring to a free service of any kind," said Behnam Dayanim, a partner at the law firm Paul Hastings LLP in Washington to CNN.
However, aside from the huge amount of money the strategy generates for Google, it has also resulted to multiple privacy lawsuits, which involve illegal wiretapping for scanning the contents of e-mails, in the United States and Europe.
The company must inform the users first before scraping any personal information. But since many users ignore the terms and conditions and privacy policies, they do not see that they have given permission to the companies to scrape and collect their information.
