The Illusion of Choice: Why Email Privacy Isn’t Really a Choice at All

At a recent conference, someone said to me: “If you care about privacy, you can use ProtonMail. If you don’t, just stick with Gmail. It’s a personal choice.”

But I didn’t agree—not for a second. That framing felt off, even dismissive. It assumes that people are actively choosing between privacy and convenience, that they’ve seen the options and weighed the trade-offs.

But here’s the truth: most people haven’t chosen Gmail. They’ve simply ended up there.

And that’s not a choice. That’s an environment. That’s a default. That’s a norm wrapped in invisibility.

The Power of the Default

Gmail is everywhere. It’s the go-to email platform on phones, in workplaces, for social media signups, and pretty much every form that requires an email address. It’s free, convenient, and integrates seamlessly with the entire Google ecosystem. That ubiquity makes it look like the natural, obvious solution.

But the power of defaults is subtle and profound. People tend to trust what’s popular. They trust what’s easy. And most importantly, they tend to go with what’s already there. This isn’t decision-making—it’s path-of-least-resistance behavior.

When Gmail is the only email service most people ever hear about, how can we pretend they’re making an informed choice?

Awareness is a Prerequisite for Choice

A real choice requires at least three things: awareness, access, and agency. Without all three, it’s an illusion.

If you’ve never heard of ProtonMail, or Tutanota, or any other privacy-first service, you can’t choose them. If you’ve never thought deeply about what happens to your emails—their contents, their metadata, how they’re scanned, stored, and monetized—then how can you weigh the trade-offs? Most people haven’t opted into Gmail so much as they’ve drifted into it.

And if Gmail is so tightly woven into the digital fabric that opting out means giving up social and professional convenience, then even knowing alternatives exist might not be enough to make switching feel possible.

That’s not a menu of options. That’s a lock-in.

The Comfort of Not Thinking About It

Part of the problem is that privacy isn’t visible until it’s violated. Most people don’t think about email privacy because nothing obviously bad has happened. But that absence of crisis doesn’t mean safety—it just means the consequences are abstract, delayed, or normalized.

Meanwhile, privacy-respecting services are framed as niche, technical, or paranoid. They’re harder to set up. They don’t integrate as easily. You have to explain them to other people. All of this adds friction. All of this narrows the field of “choices.”

So to say that email privacy is simply a matter of personal preference is to ignore the structural forces shaping what people know, what they believe they need, and what they feel is possible.

Why This Matters

Framing privacy as a consumer “choice” lets big tech companies off the hook. It suggests the current imbalance is just the result of market preference. But people can’t choose what they don’t know exists. And they don’t choose to give up privacy if they’ve never been told it was an option to keep it in the first place.

This isn’t just about email. It’s about how we think about freedom, consent, and control in a world of engineered defaults. If we want privacy to be a real choice, we need to stop pretending the current system offers one.

Because conformity by default isn’t consent. And it’s certainly not choice.