This week, GrrlScientist wrote an open letter to Google after her account was deactivated without warning:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2011/jul/28/google-open-letter-google
While she argues that she did not contravene their terms and conditions (as they were claiming), I believe that they are legally within their rights to deactivate it anyway. And it raises an interesting point. We all rely so much on free services provided by companies like Google and Facebook that we (or certainly I) would be lost without them. If Google one day decided to deactivate my gmail account then I would lose all my emails from the last few years. And since I have a tendency to forget passwords for websites, I would be permanently logged out of most of my other accounts, because the websites have no other contact address for me.
And even worse, what if Google decided tomorrow that they had been successful enough and were going to stop trading immediately, deactivating all gmail accounts. There would be complete chaos!
Because we are getting these services for free, the companies legally owe us very little. The obvious solution would be for us to pay for the services and got more rights and guarantees in return. I wouldn't dream of getting all my post sent to an address manned for free by someone who I had never met, so why do I do so with my emails?
Saying that, people have got too used to receiving all these services for free so it would be a very hard sell to get them to pay for it.
What do you think? Is there another solution?
My first e-mail was with Yahoo. When I discovered that I could eliminate ALL the ads for a mere $20 a year, I paid. A year later they asked that I update my info for a renewal. When I did so they claimed that my street address was not valid. I get mail 6 days a week at my listed address year after year. After 2 months of back and forth replies I had an on-going e-mail with Yahoo about 10 Megs long. Even Multiple phone calls to California failed to gain results, in spite of assurances that it was only a tech problem that would be taken care of.
ReplyDeleteFinally I realized that they could sell my presence to advertisers for far more than I would pay them for the e-mail. They simply DO NOT want paying users!
It does seem like advertising has taken over the internet. But I'm getting irritated by it, as I'm sure most people are, and hopefully companies will reach out to us and offer paid for ad-free subscriptions (which also provide assurances against loss of service). In the UK we are already seeing that with newspapers like "The Times" going behind paywalls. Spotify also offers different levels of service depending on how high a subscription charge you pay.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure how much money Google gets from Gmail advertising - but I'm sure they can set a fee that is greater than that which is still reasonable!