alt Hacker News> Why shouldn't I be allowed to let Google have that data if I find using Gmail to be beneficial to me?
The main issue is that this is not a conscious decision that google asks you to make. They offer a free mail service and then turn around and harvest your personal mail to increase their revenue, without most consumers realizing it.
They could've been happy with your lock-in to the google ecosystem and to google search, but they wanted to more data and systematically scoured all transactions from users' inboxes for additional data.
Like with physical mail, the digital mail has an envelope and a message. Gmail offers to handle your envelopes and assists you in viewing the message, but then went a step further and data mined all info from the messages.
In the physical world, if a company handles my inbox, it would be forbidden to open the envelope and read the message without a proper consent. The company would just open the inbox, tell me there are two letters from the bank and one letter from the customer, without reading the actual message.
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It’s not Amazon’s place to police this at all.
I think it is very clear that the "deal" with Gmail is that they host your email and use the platform to sell you things based on the content of the email (and your Google account profile in general). I don't think this is necessarily a good thing, but I don't think Amazon is defending my best interests by stripping information from emails so that I (and thus Google) cannot see their contents. Of the two companies at play in this scenario I dislike Amazon more. I can understand why you might dislike Google more; certainly they have been working hard on similar walled garden tactics on every service and platform they control. However, in each specific such scenario I am going to come down against the company crippling their product and punishing their users, and in this case it is Amazon.
Right now I am upset at Google for what they are pulling with Android developers and app installations; and I am perpetually mad at them and every other company for abandoning true third party APIs for using their services. RIP XMPP chat. RIP the golden iteration of any walled garden product that I happened to like that big tech then killed with an update, which is impossible to functionally recreate because APIs for services no longer exist.