Re: Is your privacy worth nothing?
I appreciate your comment and your preference for sound reasoning over logical fallacy in this public forum.
If it helps you sleep at night to believe that the only price you have to pay for using Gmail is that a computer in some data center is aware of your personal information, then I would have to say that since you appear not to value your privacy you are getting fair market value for it by giving it to Google for free.
Remember that Google is a company run by humans with profit motives, and that those humans built the services, infrastructure and applications we use every day including Google search, AdSense, Gmail, YouTube, and others, and they collect personal information about users as they interact with these services without providing a meaningful way to opt out of this process.
Gmail is bad enough, but what really gets me is that even Google's paid email service, Google Apps for Business, also does not provide an opt out feature for email scanning. So basically Google is getting customers to pay for the privilege of being scanned, tagged, classified, and categorized in their database.
Fortunately there are email service providers out there who will happily take your money and respect your privacy in exchange for reliable email hosting.