Will We Ever Pay For Security?

How many email accounts do you have? 3? 5? 10? One for work, two or three for your personal life, one for a special mailing list and maybe one for keeping in touch with your “friend” online who really thinks you are a 16 year old blonde girl named Tiffany. They can quickly add up and before you know it keeping all of your mailboxes cleaned out is quite a chore. Thanks to spam anyone who banks online has to be very careful about which emails they open.

Here is an example. I have both a yahoo and gmail account, both of which, I use frequently. Now, all of my personal business is conducted with the yahoo address. Paypal, banking, credit cards, everything. This works out well for my gmail account because I know that any email I get that claims to be from Paypal, my bank or my credit card company is just spam in disguise. However, this brilliant plan doesn’t work out so well when I go to check my yahoo account. You see, I still get just as much spam at the yahoo account as I do the gmail one.

So what happens? I have to carefully screen out each and every email I get, just to be sure it isn’t real. This is a huge waste of time, as I am sure anyone who has email already knows. Once upon a time I used filters on my yahoo account, but what happened? Yep, you guess it. It filtered out the real mail from Paypal along with the spam. This almost got me in big trouble when I actually had a problem with my account that one time. So, no more filter after that.

But what if I could get an email account that was practically spam free? No matter who I gave my address to I was guaranteed that no Nigerian bankers would need my help extracting large sums of money from their country. No one named Cindy, or Trixi or anything like that would try to talk me into buying videos of bisexual, virgin coeds named Mambi and Bambi. No offers to enlarge my manhood, get a fourth mortgage, or receive a degree online. And, most importantly, any email I got from Paypal, my bank or my credit card company, really was from them and not some phisher trying to scam me out of my ID.

If such a free account existed I would be all over it, sadly, I haven’t heard of it yet. But, what if such a service existed and all I had to do to participate in it was to pay a small fee. I would immediately ask how much? Would $20 per year be too much? Not for me. That would be a fair price to pay if I knew that my email was secure and spam free.

But things change a little bit when the number creeps up to, say, $50. Would that be too much to pay? Maybe. How about $100? Well, for me, that would be too steep for the security such a service would offer. But would that price be too much for someone who as already had their identity stolen before? Would that price be too much for someone who has ever been duped by a spammer? Maybe not.

The point isn’t how much someone would pay, the point is that, in a few years, I think services like this will become a thriving business. Consumers already buy home security devices to protect their homes, they buy products from Norton to protect their computers, why shouldn’t they buy a service that would protect their online identities? Giving people protection against online threats for a reasonable price seems to be a very realistic way to make money. And if I had to guess what company will seize on this opportunity first I would bet on Google.

They have the respectability, technology and market sense to capitalize on this opportunity. Think of this as the first step in Google’s attempt to completely ingrate themselves in all aspects of the web. This could be the tip of the spear as they try to create new ways of finding revenue.