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I’m still using the services of Big Email, which means I’m the product in this setting. From a philosophical standpoint, that sucks. From a practical point of view, I don’t really see any downsides. Surely there are some that I’m just not aware of.
If they want to show me some ads, I have ublock origin and NextDNS to take care of that. What else should I know about my situation?
Studies have shown that you see worse online prices than I do, because they know what you are going to buy next and they have a good guess the maximum amount you are willing to pay.
VPNs aren't enough to solve this, but you may be unaffected if you have other strong anti-fingerprinting habits, including routinely deleting all cookies and disabling JavaScript.
A terrible ~~The worst~~ thing they could be doing is providing an annual report to potential employers on how much money you make, helping your employers minimize how much they pay you. Of course, Visa could also be doing this.
The other thing they could be doing is sharing your health history, ethnicity, and any religious or political leanings with potential employers, health insurers, or governments.
In certain cases (cough the USA) we know the government has a legal right to a wire tap, if any of the servers are inside the USA.
How much any of that could affect you long term depends on who has power where, of course.
Sorry to drop all this for you. It got to where I didn't feel the risk was worth it for free email, for me. I wish I had jumped to a privacy respecting solution sooner, since I don't know how long my data will take to age out of their systems.
Edit: Sorry...I realized I used the word "worst" pretty lightly here. Worst is more like...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
Your email is the root of your digital identity, and pretty much everything in your digital life is tied to it. If your email is provided by Big Email, they own your digital identity and it exists at their whim, with no recourse if it gets taken away, compromised, or abused.
If you own your domain and pay for mail hosting, you can at least move your email between providers if something goes wrong, and have some recourse with those providers since you're a customer instead of a product.
They get access to all emails used for banking, shopping, social media accounts, etc. Depends on if you are fine with them being able to build a detailed profile off your emails.
Ads is like the least problematic aspect.
You have zero privacy and also generate power for them to do the things they do, which is gargle trump's sharty grey scrote and thus empower trump