If Gmail proved anything, it was that people would, for the most part, accept any terms of service. Or at least not care enough to read the fine-print closely.
I'll blame the early internet. So often stuff was for free, either due to the dot com bubble or just because someone wanted to create something.
More often than not the second one.
I mean, there were pages full of flash video games and animations with that sole purpose, no ulterior intentions.
When google came around, it too seemed amother neat free thing.
And they also had a “don’t be evil” slogan that existed until the founders stepped away. Google pretty immediately went to build the great firewall of China so the free ride was over a long time ago.
So much of the early internet was free because we all had so much trouble convincing anyone that it was worth investing in or even paying for. I mean… people hardly noticed it was there, seeing it was difficult and expensive, and developing what we now know as the internet was at least a decade and a trillion dollars away. Oh, and, no one believed in it or thought it was worth it. Everyone needed convincing.
Orisinal: Morning Sunshine was a website featuring 62 Adobe Flash games (as of January 2018). The website was created in 2000 by Ferry Halim who resides in Clovis, California. It won the World Summit Award in 2003 in the e-entertainment category and the Webby Award in the games category in 2003. In 2004, the site Jay Is Games commended Orisinal: Morning Sunshine for Outstanding Achievement in Artistic Expression in its Best of 2004 special awards. As of November 2010, Ferry Halim has begun selling a selection of his games on the Apple App Store in remade versions for the iPhone.
As of March 2024, the games are playable, as Ruffle has been set up on the website. Previously, they were inaccessible due to the discontinuation of Flash Player by Adobe.
Even if it weren't free companies would likely have moved towards collecting data. Just look at how the price tag of cars doesn't protect you from not being a product.
Hey member when they drove around and sucked up everybody’s wifi and (where possible) password? And then they were like “oh well if you don’t want us to use your network in our data then it’s on you to keep it out” member that.
“Security” idiot bro they hired at a bank* I used work for would drive around with a laptop and his buddies to break into WiFi as a hobby. It was truly disturbing, but he was an entitled ass so maybe not surprising.
I don’t think that’s a very fair assessment. We are a lot more aware of what “free“ is now. We weren’t informed consumers and collectively are relatively more so these days, even if most people still choose to ignore the issue. Back then we didn’t know there was an issue. I know I sure didn’t know I was agreeing to let them scan my inbox.
I also think more than ever people are now questioning what free means. So I’m not really sure how one can argue we are conditioned to accept the price of “free” when more than ever people are questioning it and adopting things like VPNs and adblockers to reassert their privacy.
Reminder that 25% of Americans use an ad blocker, constituting the largest consumer boycott in history. It’s such a big problem that Google has been actively trying to thwart it. That doesn’t seem like conditioned (in their favor) behavior if you ask me.
While 52% of Americans said they use an adblocker, which is up 18% from a 2022 analysis by Statista, that figure grew to 66% for experienced advertisers (those with five or more years of ad experience).
And the company came under fire again in 2018 after The Wall Street Journal revealed it was allowing third-party developers to trawl users’ Gmail inboxes, to which Google responded by reminding users it was within their power to grant and revoke those permissions.
So you can remove those permissions, just that it's enabled by default. Shitty design, but it's not mandatory to enable those, just like how you are not forced to use edge when you get a Windows computer.
You kind of are forced to use Edge though. There are certain functions via which Edge and only Edge will always launch. F1, the help button, is bound to a function that launches Edge anywhere in Windows Explorer, so you have a hotkey that cannot be rebound ready to pop Edge into your face at any time if you happen to fat-finger it.
The only way you can prevent it from launching Edge is either to intercept the keystroke with AHK or similar, or remove Edge in an unsanctioned manner that requires deep system fuckery, which will often be reversed on the next system update. There are other links within the system settings dialogues that do this too.