I'm amazed by how many of the comments here are missing the point entirely.
It's not about the money. It's about privacy.
When Google offered a good email service free of charge, I took them up on it. That does not mean that I would be even remotely okay with them re-writing their privacy agreement to they could start selling my personal emails to corporations or people willing to pay. If that day came, I absolutely would want to sue. Since it would be nearly hopeless to take on a company with the resources of Google on my own, a class action lawsuit would be an attractive option.
The fact that a service is provided for free is completely unrelated to obligations regarding privacy. Some here might ask, how does the service make money? Figuring that out is the responsibility of the owners, not the customers.
Google will monetize your personal emails in ways that are much more subtle than what FaceBook/Instagram are doing with the content that users upload to their service.
If you are going to sue then you have to wonder what it is that you want to achieve! Do you want to achieve that they'll stop doing it? Ok, then deny them your content, and start doing that today. Terms and conditions as a rule contain a clause that says that they can be amended at some point in the future. That alone makes most t&c completely meaningless and giving a company a large amount of data on you is a risky proposition at best.
Google is probably not dumb enough to try to sell your data direct, in spite of that you have to wonder if a free email service is worth the downside of giving some corporation such a tremendously detailed insight into who you are, what you do and who you communicate with. The safe assumption is that they'll datamine it as much as they can get away with, to monetize it as much as they can get away with just short of infuriating you enough that you'll quit.
If a service is provided for free the coin is your privacy, any assumptions to the contrary are naive. The only question is whether or not you think the trade-off is worth it. For me it isn't.
I have no problem with Google sending me targeted ads. If they do it well, I'll happily support the business model and make them money. That's a completely different proposition than giving away personally identifiable information.
>If you are going to sue then you have to wonder what it is that you want to achieve!
In the above scenario of them illegally selling my private communications to the highest bidder, I would want damages to 1) sufficiently compensate me for any violations of my privacy and 2) provide a powerful disincentive to other companies who might consider taking similar actions, thus shifting the game theory of mass consumer social businesses. In order to achieve the second of these aims, criminal charges for the offending parties would be more effective than mere financial penalties.
> Terms and conditions as a rule contain a clause that says that they can be amended at some point in the future. That alone makes most t&c completely meaningless and giving a company a large amount of data on you is a risky proposition at best.
Fortunately there are laws beyond T&C click-throughs. I support strengthening those laws in regards to any kind of of privacy bait and switches. In cases where I have a reasonable amount of trust in the company (e.g. Google), I'll use the service. But I'll still support legal protections, the EFF and those who call out underhanded companies.
Call me naive if you like, but I prefer that response to taking an RMSesque one-man stand by simply not using the tools the rest of the world is adopting.
> That's a completely different proposition than giving away personally identifiable information.
That's just one hack or a terms-of-service change away from happening. Again, google being hacked at that level is unlikely (but they've had an instance of an engineer going rogue and accessing customer accounts for stalking purposes), and google changing their TOS in such a customer hostile way is also unlikely but I would never bet against either of those happening in the longer term.
> In the above scenario of them illegally selling my private communications to the highest bidder, I would want damages to 1) sufficiently compensate me for any violations of my privacy
You're going to have to define 'sufficiently'. What price would you put on your privacy? A few hundred bucks (the typical take in a class action suit is much smaller than that, except if you're a lawyer of course). A few thousand? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? For me it is high enough that I won't consider taking the risk. And if I did take the risk I'd have implicitly granted google the ability and possibly even the right to screw me over. Using the legal system to seek redress over something that I can avoid in a much simpler way seems to be the easy solution to me. Convenience has a price, but my privacy is worth a lot more than the value of convenience.
> Fortunately there are laws beyond T&C click-throughs.
Sure there are. But especially in the United States those laws regarding privacy are pretty weak. And these are all US companies we're talking about here.
> I support strengthening those laws in regards to any kind of of privacy bait and switches.
I would too, but right now bait-and-switch is perfectly legal, as long as you warn up front that you can change your terms you're in the clear.
> Call me naive if you like, but I prefer that response to taking an RMSesque one-man stand by simply not using the tools the rest of the world is adopting.
For me it isn't worth it, for you it is. If you look back in a few years with regret then you have to wonder what real grounds you have for a lawsuit, after all this is apparently something you are aware of, you can't use the law to fix such things after the fact. The loss of your privacy can not be undone.
It's not about the money. It's about privacy.
When Google offered a good email service free of charge, I took them up on it. That does not mean that I would be even remotely okay with them re-writing their privacy agreement to they could start selling my personal emails to corporations or people willing to pay. If that day came, I absolutely would want to sue. Since it would be nearly hopeless to take on a company with the resources of Google on my own, a class action lawsuit would be an attractive option.
The fact that a service is provided for free is completely unrelated to obligations regarding privacy. Some here might ask, how does the service make money? Figuring that out is the responsibility of the owners, not the customers.