Google is getting away with this behavior because of their monopolistic behavior. If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. This is their way of saving money and taking advantage of their monopoly. It's a shadow version of monopolistic behavior where the absence of services can be done because we have no choice. We need to politicize this issue.
Facebook is exactly the same way.
When a company reaches such dominance, and when people completely rely on a company like we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al., then we need regulations to prevent what is happening right now, which is using their monopoly to make life easier for them by not spending any money on customer support.
Would you prefer government change this balance by regulation, or let users decide what they want?
Many users choose very cheap typical service with a small but real risk of misery. Perhaps it's because they don't understand how miserable it can get. It's important that the bad experiences see public light so people's choices are informed.
They provide products like gmail for free because it allows them insight into people's communication which they can then leverage with search and ad networking to make way more than they could simply selling email services.
That said, why do people care so much about Google using Gmail data for ad. You either trust Google or not.
If you are convinced that random humans won't read your private emails for fun and giggles then why should I care if their regexes or neural networks are fed my emails or my search history?
The only downside is if someone is watching your screen, certain ads can reveal the content of your emails in that scenario.
Google should simply provide a paid version for all its services in case people dislike ads but whether their code runs on my gmail or Google Drive content doesn't matter that much to me.
What does this have to do with anything I said?
I never made a judgement of it being bad or good. I just pointed out that probably Google isn't providing Gmail as a free service out of any kind of charity