Evolving Free Mail Programs

Hot mail, G mail, Yahoo mail and many other free E mail programs are becoming the dominant behemoths on the net. They are evolving into more than the original concept as a simple platform to send and receive E mail outside of the users servers more restricted mailbox. I like the idea of them and for years had have had a hot mail box as a "junk mail" box for. When I have to give an address to a web site I use the hot mail box so it gets the endless spam and other annoyances that come when one posts his or her address on line.

Those free mail boxes used to be simple, but no more. Google's G mail is leading the way to the free mail program being the heart of the web site rather than an adjunct to it. It has been adding and deleting "cutsie' features to attract users away from the old stand by hot mail and yahoo and to G mail and to Google itself. It now has added a Facebook-like social service aspect (it calls it "Buzz") to the Google site. Strange though, when Buzz first came out it showed users the names and E mail addresses of all the people a person E mailed. That invasion of privacy was objected to so much by the users that Google got rid of the feature.

Fact is, anyone who goes on line today knows that he or she trades some anonymity for the access to the programs used. When we have to fill out the information boxes to use a program we pay the site by giving them our personal information it uses to sell to advertisers who annoy us with spam ads. We buy things using our private information as "currency".

But at what cost? The person who uses one of the free E mail or other sites never knows what costs will arise from surrendering the currency of our private information. Will it be used only to make money from advertisers who use it reasonably, or will it fall into the hands of unscrupulous persons who will misuse it and take away our privacy or even or rape the user financially? The fact that sites like Google value our "data" more than even our cash shows it must be very valuable to them. And to add to that problem is the fact that many users don't realize that when they surrender information they more expose themselves to possible on-line trauma.

Speaking of on-line trauma, Facebook has announced that it will keep active the accounts of users who are deceased in order to "collectively share mourning for the lost one". That is an interesting decision, unique as most accounts are deleted after it has been inactive for six months. this means a person will live eternally on line, kind of a high tech photo memory book where others can revisit as if visiting a grave site.

It seems like the competition among the free sites is getting intense as each looks for traffic that can bring advertising rewards. Our presence at their sites is equal to payments to them, and that means, that as long as we give up our private information, for better or worse we are in the driver's seat