Day 21 - May 21 - The Big Cost of Free Accounts
- Elizabeth Rasnick
- May 24, 2023
- 2 min read
Free! Who doesn’t love free stuff? Especially for those of us on tight budgets, free items sometimes fill the gap for things we couldn’t otherwise have. Nothing is completely free. We all know the phrase “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” There is truth to it; we always give something in exchange for a free thing. It may be that we give up time to hear about a product we are receiving a free sample of. Or, we may receive free pens from an organization, but the pens have the organization’s information on them, making you likely to call that organization when you need the services they offer.
Things work differently online. To begin with, you do not own a free email account. The email provider does and has the option to close your account if they feel one of their policies has been violated. A closed account is inaccessible. You are not able to see old or saved emails. Nothing. I’ve had a couple of email accounts for several years. Losing one in particular would mean the loss of a lot of personal history. So, control is one of the costs of a free account.
Typically, what you give up for a free account is your privacy and your data. The cost of a free email account is access to your data. These accounts are mined for data that loads of organizations are willing to pay money to get in their hands. The information they are after has to do with our buying habits and life stages. For example, if our email contains several (relatively) recent discussions of weddings that is something the wedding industry companies will pay to know. And, not so suddenly, we start seeing ads related to weddings. Or, let’s say, you’ve been looking at real estate because you are considering buying a home. You should not be surprised to see ads for home insurance agents in the zip codes where you’ve been looking start to pop up in your email. Someone else has taken data from your free email account and monetized it. For me, aside from feeling like my privacy has been violated, someone is making money off of me. I need that money, thank you very much.
Just to add insult to injury, there is nothing stopping the businesses that bought your data from the email provider from selling it to other businesses. Yes, there is a secondary market for our personal data that has been harvested from our email accounts. Yet another opportunity for our data to be sold without us pocketing any of the proceeds.
Here are some suggestions for mitigating these data hemorrhages.
Read the user agreement for any free account you have or are considering. These are updated periodically. Pay attention to the changes.
Use the spam blockers in your account to your advantage. This can weed out some of the junk mail that has been spawned by data mining.
Use the filters in your account to direct emails to specific folders. This will help make sorting through your email less cumbersome.
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