Privacy Harbor™

Invading Your Privacy and Hurting Your Business

“Free Web-mail” is Not Free

The success of advertising supported web-services is determined by how well they exploit consumer information. Consumers want free email, and email services want information to harvest and high traffic ad-space. Their mission is to generally and freely harvest economic value wherever they may, from any content that touches their thousands upon thousands of servers and then specifically re-purpose it to their fee-paying advertisers.

Email is Scanned for Keywords

If you have ever sent email to someone with Google, Hotmail or other so-called “free” web-mail, you have served up that information to advertisers—and the growth of annual advertising revenue confirm why such business models are fast becoming dominant.

Using vast data storage resources, and ever more sophisticated data scanning technology, their processors instantly discover and tabulate any key words that signify an identifiable commercial interest, to perpetually and instantly refresh and enrich large proprietary databases of millions upon millions of user profiles organized by their email address. On the other side of their advertising business, they provide web-based advertisers with software tools that enable them to define, test, measure and refine the most commercially relevant user keywords (profiles) so they get their advertisements for their products and services delivered to their consumer targets. And, since web-media companies own the “free” web-service properties themselves, they offer the means to instantly have such advertisements delivered directly to their users, or serve as a go-between with their marketing ‘partners’ to indirectly deliver SPAM to the non-users of their services.

Why Do Email Users Put Up With These Ads?

There are two basic categories of email users: business and consumers. Each have a different perspective on email privacy.

As a business user you have clear and relatively unchanging commercial interest in your communications. Given the choice, your business would prefer that corporate knowledge (i.e. email content) remain exclusively in the service of your commercial interests and not be repurposed by web-media companies for competitive advertisements—directed toward customers!

On the other hand, consumers tend to have a personal, temporary, non-focused, nonexclusive, noncommercial privacy interest. Outside of the nuisance factor when they receive unsolicited ads for things they just “happen” to have recently communicated about, most consumers are unconcerned by this.

In one such situation shown below, a Sales person sent communications to one of his customers. That customer, upon checking their email, was shown competing ads right along side the message. As the number of advertisers grow, ads become ever more local and specific—and more of a threat to business' that use email.