You had mentioned that you don't understand the concept of "opening up mail". I was just making a point that it is in fact quite comparable (your analog vs digital argument).
In essence though, I don't disagree with you. It must be done for email to work at all.
"Acquiring" though, depending on how you interpret it, doesn't, unless we want spam prevention, custom filters, search etc, which obviously people are used to.
The bigger question is whether doing that to show ads is legal or not.
