Re:Gmail tracks the history of things you buy, and it’s hard...
by Lio on Saturday May 18, 2019 @04:45AM
(#19946383)
One thing though, customers like me use FastMail specifically because they aren't in the Privacy Farming business like Google.
If they ever do start privacy farming then I'll be incentivised to move my domain to a separate supplier.
If I didn't care about that I'd just be using Google's "free" service already. So FastMail are incentivised to protect their business and to not compete head on with Google.
I'm sure they could sell that data (maybe even to Google) even if they don't sell ads themselves.
(I'm not saying they do read emails, but "more money" is a big incentive)