You Might Have to Pay for Gmail. You Always Did.—Data Sheet

You may have read some scary headlines this week, the week before Halloween, about Gmail. It’s the free email service with over 1.5 billion users that probably far too many of us depend on for all our personal online communication needs. Despite the season, though, I’m here to tell you it will all be okay.

The scare was that Google was going to start “making us pay” for Gmail. It’s certainly a potential revenue source of great depth. If just 10% of Gmail users coughed up $100 a year, that would be $15 billion. Even for a giant like Google, with revenue of $75 billion in the first half of this year, that’s a significant sum. On the other hand, it might deter people from using Gmail, hitting advertising revenue in ways not obvious to those outside the company.

But there’s one big problem with the scare story: Gmail has never been totally free. Google always limited the amount of storage for your mail and attachments and charged if you wanted more.

It’s true that the limit for free storage hasn’t been raised since 2013, when the ‘Plexers said we could stash 15 GB of digital detritus across Gmail, Drive, and Photos without charge. But it’s also true that the amount Google charges for extra storage has been falling over time. Today you can get 100 GB of cloud storage for $20 year (that I remember paying $150 for a 400 megabyte hard drive once is just crazy). At 20 cents a gig, Google’s plan is just a little cheaper than Apple’s intro 50 GB plan that works out to 24 cents a gig. Both giants will also sell you a whopping 2 TB, enough to store an estimated 170 million pages of Word documents, for $100 or $120. You don’t know me very well if you don’t know that’s the plan I’m on (just call me Packrat Pressman).

But actually how much storage do you need for Gmail? My 14 years of personal email and whatnot, including some 18,000 messages in my primary in-box, are currently consuming a grand total of 5.66 GB. By the way, want to freak yourself out? Click on the email counter on the top right side of the Gmail page and choose to sort mail by oldest first. Baby pictures of the kids, notes from old flames, who knows what you’ll find? Google has a whole support doc with advice for clearing out that tangled mess.

The scare story cropped up because Google did cut off one kind of free storage, sort of. Pixel phone buyers used to be able to keep unlimited photos in full quality stored with Google. Now with the Pixel 4, the free storage is only for somewhat compressed versions of your photos. But cutting one free thing, even sort of, doesn’t make a trend. So we’re back to 2013, I guess.

Today’s Data Sheet comes courtesy of another Google freebie, of sorts. I’m trying out the new Pixelbook Go laptop for an upcoming review. Send me any questions or concerns you have about the newest Chromebook and I’ll be back to you with more details soon.

Aaron Pressman

On Twitter: @ampressman

Email: aaron.pressman@fortune.com

NEWSWORTHY

Riding into the sunset. Nadiem Makarim, the founder and CEO of Indonesia's super-unicorn startup Gojek, resigned this week to become the country's minister of education and culture. The $10 billion startup which offers ride hailing, payments, food delivery, and other services named Kevin Aluwi and Andre Soelistyo co-CEOs.

Capitol grilling. It was a tough going over for Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg, who went to Washington, D.C., to answer lawmakers' questions about the Libra digital currency project. Actually, it's not a digital currency but a "digital payments system," Zuck explained. While Zuckerberg talked, the world's top cryptocurrency, bitcoin, plunged below $7,500, its lowest level in five months. Elsewhere on the Hill, some senators asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Amazon and its web services unit were culpable in part for the massive Capital One hack.

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. In an effort to get around state censorship from the likes of China and Iran, the BBC is putting a version of its news web site on the so-called dark web. That will allow people to get around the censors' Internet blocks if they have access to the Tor Network used for private web browsing.

A piece of the action. On Wall Street, Microsoft posted a beat and Tesla boomed, but Twitter, oh Twitter...In Redmond, Microsoft saw revenue rise 14% to $33 billion, even as sales of Surface and Xbox slipped and Azure slowed. Its stock price, up 35% this year, gained 1% in premarket trading on Thursday morning. Electric carmaker Tesla surged to a surprise profit on record vehicle production. Tesla shares, down 23% in 2019, jumped 19% in premarket trading. Twitter missed expectations for revenue, earnings, and users (145 million daily represented growth of 17% from last year). Twitter shares, up 35% in 2019, plunged 19%, erasing more than half of the year's gain.

Lock it down. Remember the story of how you could evade the fingerprint scan security on the new Samsung Galaxy Note 10 with a simple screen protector? Not anymore.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Image recognition, machine learning, recommendation engines–all these A.I. high tech wonders will make the world a better place, maybe. But first, can they help sell more burgers and fries? New York Times reporter David Yaffe-Bellany chronicles efforts by McDonald's to harness A.I. for its own uses.

The chain has digital boards programmed to market that food more strategically, taking into account such factors as the time of day, the weather, the popularity of certain menu items and the length of the wait. On a hot afternoon, for example, the board might promote soda rather than coffee. At the conclusion of every transaction, screens now display a list of recommendations, nudging customers to order more. At some drive-throughs, McDonald’s has tested technology that can recognize license-plate numbers, allowing the company to tailor a list of suggested purchases to a customer’s previous orders, as long as the person agrees to sign away the data.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

The World’s Largest Lighting Company Is Making Big Promises for a WiFi Alternative—But 5G Awaits By Mark Halper

What’s Next for Google After Claiming ‘Quantum Supremacy’? By Robert Hackett

Amazon Executive on Fight Over Huge Defense Contract: ‘The Process Was Not Rigged’ By David Z. Morris

How Best Buy’s Corie Barry Went From Being Seen as ‘a Risk’ at the Company to Its CEO By Phil Wahba

Bozoma Saint John Learned the Importance of Standing Out From Hot Pepper Soup By Aaron Pressman

3 Things Disney CEO Robert Iger Says People Can Expect From Disney+ By Danielle Abril

Who Are the Ultrawealthy? These Charts Will Give You an Idea Where they live, how they got their money, and more. By Nicolas Rapp and Daniel Bentley

BEFORE YOU GO

It feels like it wouldn't be Data Sheet without some laughs at the expense of the company formerly known as WeWork. Start with Matt Levine's gut-busting take yesterday, complete with fictional dialogue of former We CEO Adam Neumann. Also, for a more visual gag, check out the snappy response of Fortune digital editor Andrew Nusca to Neumann back in 2016, after Neumann live on stage asks him: "Are you going to apologize for choosing us as one of the three unicorns to bet against?"

Aaron Pressman

On Twitter:@ampressman

Email: aaron.pressman@fortune.com

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