Long before Gmail became smart enough to finish your sentences, Google’s now-ubiquitous email service was buttering up the public for a fate that defined the internet age: if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.
When Gmail was announced on April 1, 2004, its lofty promises and the timing of its release reportedly had people assuming it was a joke. It wasn’t the first web-based email provider — Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail had already been around for years — but Gmail was offering faster service, automatic conversation grouping for messages, integrated search functions and 1GB of storage, which was at the time a huge leap forward in personal cloud storage. Google in its press release boasted that a gigabyte was “more than 100 times” what its competitors offered. All of that, for free.
Except, as Gmail and countless tech companies in its wake have taught us, there’s no such thing as free. Using Gmail came with a tradeoff that’s now commonplace: You get access to its service, and in exchange, Google gets your data. Specifically, its software could scan the contents of account holders’ emails and use that information to serve them personalized ads on the site’s sidebar. For better or worse, it was a groundbreaking approach.
“Depending on your take, Gmail is either too good to be true, or it’s the height of corporate arrogance, especially coming from a company whose house motto is ‘Don’t Be Evil,’” tech journalist Paul Boutin wrote for Slate when Gmail launched. (Boutin, one of its early media testers, wrote favorably about Google’s email scanning but suggested the company implement a way for users to opt out lest they reject it entirely.)