The problem with dumping gmail for another email provider is that at least half of the people with whom I correspond use gmail too so my messages wind up on their servers anyway.
Edit: REALLY tired of all the idiotic downvoting lately. What I've said is factual. Don't be such a lazy fuck and post a rebuttal if you disagree.
Yes, and likewise you don't have any guarantee that anyone you talk to, tell stuff, share stuff with, etc. won't go then share that with someone/thing you disapprove of. If that's really an issue for you, then just encrypt all conversations you care about, and don't talk to people you can't trust (and can't trust to use 'secure' methods, for however you define the term secure).
This is not a problem with GMail, per se. It's a broader issue of trust.
The difference is the concentration of email in one company's hands. Ironically it would be less of an issue if all my friends were using different providers but, since they're all on GMail, our conversations get sieved either way.
Sure, but the difference is in the implied consent.
If I continue to use Gmail beyond another week or two (what's that deadline, again?) I've implicitly consented to Google's policy on what they're permitted to do with my email. (One nice thing about Google: I can't really claim they haven't told me about this nonsense. They are taking the notification of their customers very seriously.)
If, however, I'm not actually a Google user, but the Googlers secretly reassemble my mailboxes by sniffing the inboxes and outboxes of all of my friends and relations... well, that's a bigger transgression. They didn't ask my permission to do that, and when they asked my permission to do similar things I said no. So they'd better be good at keeping their activities secret, because if I ever learn that they did it I'll squawk a long, loud squawk.
Sure, social disapproval doesn't have the force of law. (At least, not right away.) But it does have force.
It's not just your email but the recipients as well, and they can do what they want with it. Why would you care if they were able to figure out that you like computers and target more relevant ads?
Here's your rebuttal: shine another light on your situation and suddenly instead of having half the messages ending up on google servers anyways, you have half of your email freed from google servers which is better than having all on it there, privacywise.
I imagine about 20% of my email correspondence is all it would take for Google to form a pretty accurate picture of my interests and habits and circles of acquaintance. That's the way machine learning usually works: you don't need a complete dataset to make useful inferences.
Edit: REALLY tired of all the idiotic downvoting lately. What I've said is factual. Don't be such a lazy fuck and post a rebuttal if you disagree.