> You know what data Fastmail sells about me to advertisers? Nothing.
Why do you think so? Specifically what are the reasons that you think this about Fastmail that do not apply to Gmail?
> Working for Google, I wonder if you have a conflict of interest in defending them so much.
I mean, technically I probably shouldn't be writing anything about Google products. But my area of work is so far from Gmail, that I only interact with it as a customer.
I don't know whether it will convince you that I'm not very biased about Gmail, but I do want to point out that I find at least one argument in favor of Fastmail pretty convincing and it's human support. Google has a pretty abysmal track record of handling accounts that they think are suspicious and if ever I change company I don't want to be in a position where my account is blocked without any recourse.
Google has a number of completely unrelated businesses. The fact that one of them has to do with advertising doesn't mean it would monetize other businesses through advertising.
Conversely here's a reason why I think Google is _less_ likely to invade Gmail users' privacy: It's already one of the most scrutinized companies in the world. If it were doing something shady with emails, it would likely to be picked up. Furthermore, it's a big company. More employees would know about that and it's more likely that someone would whistle-blow.
> Google has a number of completely unrelated businesses. The fact that one of them has to do with advertising doesn't mean it would monetize other businesses through advertising.
Correct, but 80.78% of Alphabet’s revenues were from advertising related income last year. See Note 2 to their financial statements[0]. Alphabet is through-and-through an advertising company at its core. It’s a fair assumption that their other ventures are potentially used to generate more advertising revenue in one way or another.
Also as a former auditor, I’m glad we’ve disclosed your conflict of interest working for the company. Unfortunately that means others cannot take you as seriously as you’d like.
That does not mean they don't train all sorts of models on the data, or harvest it to fill out their profiles of users, or any number of other things Google exists to do that are user-hostile.
"We don’t show you personalized ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail, or Photos." (https://policies.google.com/privacy)