[ioneja]

There's that argument again that since you can't get away from it 100%, you might as well just cave in and let it happen. I do understand that argument and why most people are fine with it. And while it's true that you can't escape *some* profile being generated by the big tech companies, you can absolutely reduce your footprint and change the kind and depth of profile they generate about you. You can take more ownership of it instead of surrender, and more and more jurisdictions are making laws that improve your control to some degree. In fact you were already doing it to some degree by using ad blockers and thus getting crappy ads. But like others have said, it's a personal choice how far you want to go. Obviously, to get rid of all tracking, you need to get off the grid, which is not what we're talking about, and very difficult to do.

As for the "security" issue, that's a different discussion than privacy of course.

And whatever email service you use, you have to trust them that someone is "not sitting in their basement reading your emails for kicks." It's very true, that just because you pay for email, that doesn't necessarily make them more trustworthy or secure, but likewise just because they have a billion users, doesn't necessarily make them more trustworthy or secure either. Google has been the subject of plenty of security breaches, as have other free services like Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.. And if years of experience and security experience counts (which it does) frankly some of these small paid third party email services have been around for longer than GMail, and some have contributed extensively to the open source code that powers most email providers.... or in some cases they release most or all of their codebase as open source, which is then open to all to scrutinize. Gmail, MS, etc., certainly don't do that.

But with everything, YMMV and everyone has different needs and preferences.