If you set up Gmail on your phone you’re not being advertised to at all when you check your mail. It seems hard to imagine any way providing that service for free would be worth their while if they couldn’t harvest the data.
Well, that's Google's choice, and Google's problem. The fact that they made this choice does not negate my right not to be tracked.
Anyway, if free email providers were impossible without universal tracking (they existed before the web got extensive tracking, so you are wrong), they shouldn't exist. If you want emails for all, and it's not economical, you can always have your government to intervene.
In my opinion, Facebook is unequivocally harmful to society at large.
I don't think GMail is unequivocally harmful, although the fact that people can use gmail addresses that don't look like gmail addresses is a problem for those of us who really try to never send email to gmail addresses in order to keep our data out of Google's realm.
And before anybody claims that it only restricts the government (it doesn't, it tasks the government into guaranteeing it), we have enough evidence that this kind of business model will be exploited to create an all encompassing gatekeeper for our society's communication, and at this point those companies are really paragovernamental entities, what no country should allow to exist.
That's it!
I’m personally with you, by the way, but I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s not the only valid position.
I would really like to know how many people are actually like this, if they knew the full, total picture. There will be a lot, that's sure, but maybe not the overwhelming majority of uninformed people we have now.
I'd feel like there's no universal God-given social contract that says they have a "right" to this, so I'd suggest we ban it anyways (just like they're free to suggest to allow it).
You could make the same argument, and I would still argue to ban automated data collection.
That's how we make laws: we choose our sides of the argument, and (if we're lucky to live in a functional democracy) vote for it, or vote others that promote the same ideas.
Surely there's some middle ground between no digital tracking of users and North Korea?