HN Gopher Feed (2017-06-26) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads
789 points by ahiknsr
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-23/google-will-s...le-will-stop-reading-your-emails-for-gmail-ads___________________________________________________________________
nachtigall - 21 hours ago
Seriously, there's private, ad-free mail for 1$ a months:
https://posteo.de/en/ or https://mailbox.org/en/
mrmondo - 8 hours ago
Too little, too late IMO
mozzarella - 19 hours ago
I wonder what the conversion rates on these within-client ads are.
I know I've never opened any no matter how well-targeted or
'interesting' the ads were, because the immediate response is to
just want to sweep the inbox clean.
megamindbrian - 15 hours ago
Their AI knows what you are thinking anyways. The singularity is
here!!
jshelly - 18 hours ago
And I am in the middle of migrating to icloud from google. Not
going to stop at this point.
erikb - 18 hours ago
Not sure if sarcasm or serious stupidity. Please clarify.
jshelly - 17 hours ago
neither, serious, why?You seem to comment frequently here on HN
where I consider most users to be above average in the level of
intelligent replies so your trolling seems quite out of place.
4684499 - 16 hours ago
I'm fine to let them scan my emails for spam filter, yet they use
it as an excuse to justify their data collection and other things
they do with my data, which is unacceptable for me. How would I
know if they are going to do things against my interests one day?
Ads targeting is already against mine.I used to see Google as a
stalker. How naive I was. There are billions of people being
stalked, exploited, and the whole process is automated. It comes to
me that users are not victims of stalking, they are lab rats.Now
Google stopped reading emails for ads, but they'll still read for
other purposes, which still makes me as a user feel insecure. I
value my privacy, I have my dignity, I shouldn't be a lab rat that
they can just observe however they want only because they provide
free cheese.Even if I start using a paid account to stop them from
reading my emails (assume paid account with better privacy
protection is possible), I couldn't stop them from reading others'.
Stopping the data collection of one user won't change the
situation, they still have other lab rats' data they could collect
and analyze, which enables them to learn or predict other rats'
behaviors.The worst thing is, Google is not the only company doing
this right now. Surveillance technologies are developing, it's like
every data company has grown their teeth and become more thirsty
for blood.Edit: words.
kolemcrae - 23 hours ago
Interesting - as an advertiser I generally recommend using the
email address "sent from" as your main source of targeting but
combining that with specific keywords within the gmail campaign can
be super helpful at finding people at the exact right time.
shostack - 19 hours ago
Yeah, targeting competitor domain names tends to perform pretty
well. Do you know if domain targeting is disappearing with this
update?
sidcool - 23 hours ago
Google will still show ads in Gmail, just not based on email
contents.
vaishaksuresh - 21 hours ago
I very recently switched to fastmail and couldn't be happier. For
$90 a year, I don't have to deal with people snooping and tracking
me around for ads. I know google is trying to give me value with
all their facial recognition and recommendations, but I don't think
it is going to end well. When it does end badly, it will be too
late for the user because we would've given up all the data. I
don't want Google to build models to track my toddler's face when
he isn't even capable of consenting to such tracking.
Veratyr - 19 hours ago
I tried Fastmail for a while but I just couldn't deal with the
spam. There was a lot of spam and Gmail's filters seem to be
better at dealing with it.
hyper_reality - 16 hours ago
This is also merely anecdotal, but I don't recall having ever
received more than a few spam emails in either my Gmail or
Fastmail inboxes.
majewsky - 19 hours ago
> 90$ a yearSounds excessive. Does this include any special
features beyond privacy? I pay 1? per month for a privacy-
respecting mailbox at posteo.de
vaishaksuresh - 19 hours ago
$90 is the most expensive plan. Their basic plan start from $30
or $3 a month. I'll downgrade to a cheaper plan in the future,
but $90 a year for something I use on a daily basis does not
seem excessive to me. That is about ?25 a day.
samblr - 21 hours ago
how are you sure that fastmail is secure and they aren't using ur
data to build models ? because there is an annual subscription or
they advertise it so ?
bthrn - 20 hours ago
They advertise it as such.From their privacy policy:"Incoming
messages are scanned for the purpose of spam detection unless
you disable spam protection for your account... To make message
searching fast, we build an index of your messages (this is a
table, just like you would find at the back of a reference
book, in which you can look up a word to quickly find the
emails in which it appears).No information from any of these
activities is used for any other purpose, or to compile any
kind of profile on our
users."https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html
samblr - 20 hours ago
Is it generally possible to reconstruct email(=text) with
indicies if they are stolen/hacked ?Although Im not
questioning fastmail ability to provide secured email
service. Yet I cannot help think why I would rely on a small
player for email. I would ask what is the probability of
fastmail service getting hacked say compared to
gmail.(Somebody has right pointed out that ) Ad relevance to
your email is not same as reading - thinking in same vein
should also lead us to believe even (spam) classification can
be termed as reading.
tajen - 19 hours ago
> I cannot help think why would I rely on a small player
for email.If Fastmail were, say, 1% of Google size, it
would still be #2, which is a pretty good ranking on any
market. And if you don't lose features by switching to the
#2, please do it, for the sake of competition ? Give
freedom a chance.I'm using Fastmail for my 3-ppl business.
We lack no feature, we get used to it, we pay them (cheap),
we don't leak our source code to GitHub and other browsing
habits or contacts to Google Analytics/G+, it's just good
management of the company information. We are the annoying
guys who can't click "Connect with Facebook" nor "Connect
with G+" and that makes providers keep the login/pw auth.
Plus it funds a company so you might still have a choice in
5 years. And we show VCs that writing "privacy" on
commercial documents yields customers.Cost to us? Zero.
vaishaksuresh - 20 hours ago
I can talk about myself and the reason I think Gmail is not
working for me. I'm less worried about the security part of
the email and more about the tracking aspect. I don't need
encrypted emails, however I don't want someone gleaning
information from my emails and using it for selling me
stuff and generally profiling. All my Amazon order
confirmation used to go to Gmail and they would most
definitely read it. I know this because they use it to show
me status of the deliveries. It is not unrealistic to think
Google will also use this data to build patterns around my
buying habits and things I use etc. That does not make me
feel comfortable. Amazon already know that because I shop
there, I don't want Google also knowing that.My opinion is
tracking, ads are all fine on the primary website, but if
you follow me around the web, tracking my every move, I'll
stop using such services and try my best to prevent the
tracking.
albinowax_ - 17 hours ago
I'm a security person, and I've found vulnerabilities in
both fastmail and various core google services (although
not gmail).Fastmail and gmail both have mature bug bounty
programs, which mean they will pay out cash to anyone who
finds and reports a way to hack them:
https://www.fastmail.com/about/bugbounty.html This shows
that they are willing to put money behind their claims to
security and probably puts them in the top few % of
difficult to hack websites above eg windows live mail.Also,
it's a mistake to think a company will be more secure
because it's larger. If anything, I'd say it's the
opposite; large companies tend to have complex websites
with vastly more attack surface.Of course, every email
provider is vulnerable to certain governments.
zargon - 19 hours ago
If I were to use Gmail I would consider myself already
hacked.
[deleted]
DerfNet - 20 hours ago
Is there any reason not to go with ProtonMail? They seem to be
the big recommendation lately for encrypted email service.
newscracker - 9 hours ago
ProtonMail does not yet have IMAP support (it's in beta after
more than two years of requests). So if you ever get tired of
ProtonMail and want to move to some other provider, your only
option is to save each mail or print it out - one by one. There
is no bulk mail export option. Unless one is super confident of
staying happy with ProtonMail for at least a year or two (by
when I expect IMAP to be publicly available on the platform),
I'd stay away from it for any serious use.Leaving this aside,
other factors do favor ProtonMail. The people who run it seem
to have their minds and hearts in the right place as far as
privacy is concerned.
Propen - 19 hours ago
I'd really love to support ProtonMail but one thing I can't
swallow is that there's no server-side search of email bodies
(only to/from & subject) because it's encrypted. This kills the
possibility of searching through years of newsletters & stuff
:/
jszymborski - 17 hours ago
[I'm stupid they have 2FA, ignore this comment.]Another huge
problem is the lack of two-factor authentication. How can a
security-oriented service not offer TOTP or even SMS 2FA.
stockmania - 17 hours ago
2FA has been out for almost 6 months.
jszymborski - 16 hours ago
Oops, my Google-fu is worse than I thought.
bartbutler - 19 hours ago
You will be able to use the upcoming ProtonMail IMAP/SMTP
bridge to do fulltext search locally.
vaishaksuresh - 20 hours ago
No particular reason, I just knew fastmail from many years ago
and liked them.
joering2 - 15 hours ago
I emailed them (Proton) on few occasions with important
questions and never got a single response. That alone turned
me off. Will go with Fastmail very soon moving my yahoo since
Verizon bought them.
jszymborski - 18 hours ago
Anyone know about a Canadian service (operated & hosted) like
FastMail? OVH has a hosted exchange service, but no 2FA is a deal
breaker for me.
tomaskafka - 16 hours ago
I have a problem with price. $90 for about 20 personal emails per
year and a bunch of useful newsletters? Is there a $10 hosted
mail that sends and receives reliably and doesn't sell my
personal data on top of subscription (like AV companies)?
duncan_bayne - 16 hours ago
The support is first rate. I've seen their developers on Github
helping to track down a synchronisation problem that could have
either been with the open source tool, or Fastmail.Turns out it
was a Fastmail bug, and they promptly fixed it.
newscracker - 9 hours ago
My recommendations for cheaper, more flexible and privacy
respecting services are Posteo (no custom domains) and Mailbox
(allows custom domains). See my comment above at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14624624
rocqua - 20 hours ago
I still like gmail for its spam filter and notably "important
mail" function. Outside of those, I'd switch to something self-
hosted.
gub09 - 14 hours ago
$5/month and an afternoon to set up unlimited email accounts on
unlimited domains on one server. There are a few scripts/services
out there that limit the pain.
gub09 - 14 hours ago
Does fastmail let you use your own domain?
reynoldsbd - 13 hours ago
Yes indeed
vaishaksuresh - 13 hours ago
Yup they do. That is what I use it for.
weitzj - 19 hours ago
We are using fastmail as well, and it is great. They have a
solution for every weird mail-problem we tried to solve, i.e.
shared inbox folders, shared calendars and integration with
"dump" client applications.For example your username might differ
in order to access a shared calendar.Also you can generate
application passwords for an account. So you can create an SMTP-
only application password for your fastmail account.
weitzj - 19 hours ago
Oh. And personally I am using mailbox.org which is also nice
but a little bit cheaper. And the feature-set is still great,
but limited compared to FastMail. Also the webui in mailbox.org
is slower than for fastmail.
jszymborski - 13 hours ago
one nice thing about mailbox.org is that you can have them
encrypt incoming email with PGP. Allows you to use IMAP and
get protonmail/tutanote-esque security... I really like it :)
newscracker - 9 hours ago
I'd recommend Posteo [1] and Mailbox [2] to people mainly for
the costs. They're cheap and are a lot more flexible in
pricing as your needs grow.Fastmail becomes terribly
expensive once you realize you need multiple accounts (not
just aliases) for different people in the family. At least
for me, paying a few hundred dollars on Fastmail (or anywhere
else) for email is really way too expensive. I've also
written to Fastmail asking for flexible pricing options, but
they responded that they're not even considering any changes
on pricing/flexibility for the near future.Edit: If one
doesn't need custom domains and office suites, I'd recommend
only Posteo! That company is way ahead of others in being
better for all humans (read on their website about all the
things they do).[1]: https://www.posteo.de[2]:
https://www.mailbox.org
komali2 - 20 hours ago
>facial recognitionIs there some sort of Gmail camera thing I'm
not aware of?
vaishaksuresh - 20 hours ago
Google Photos. I'm talking about Google in general, not Gmail
in particular.
prirun - 15 hours ago
My guess is that with Google Drive, they are getting way more
information on individuals and companies than they ever got via
email.
m-p-3 - 19 hours ago
But they'll most likely read them for another purpose, for example
training their AI.
jmull - 22 hours ago
I should probably get fitted for a tinfoil hat because my immediate
reaction was, "Oh shit! They must've developed something now that
tracks you better and is less obvious."
return0 - 22 hours ago
me too, but i doubt their technology can be stopped with tinfoil
josephjrobison - 22 hours ago
Definitely, they probably realize they get better targeting by
using demographic metrics like Facebook does - age, wealth,
gender, interests, likes, etc - than they do by scanning email
contents for keywords.
Animats - 22 hours ago
Exactly. From the article: "But instead of scanning a user?s
email, the ads will now be targeted with other personal
information Google already pulls from sources such as search and
YouTube."
AJ007 - 21 hours ago
It means their behavioral targeting now out earns contextual
targeting, by quite a bit. This is just spin.
sillysaurus3 - 22 hours ago
Actually, you can buy some paint that blocks all RF signals. It's
absurdly expensive but quite effective. There aren't many ways to
get signals out of a room painted with the stuff.If you're
thinking "Why not just build a faraday cage?" then you're
thinking the right thing.
problems - 22 hours ago
I've thought about turning my whole house into a faraday cage
way too many times to be considered sane still.
sillysaurus3 - 22 hours ago
It's fun, isn't it? It's one of those things that costs way
too much to be practical but you can't help but try to think
of ways to get the cost down. Mini-SpaceX in a useless
domain.
pythonaut_16 - 22 hours ago
I've always thought that would be cool, then just have a
fiber connection for communications and either air gap your
main power or provide your own via solar and wind.
Overtonwindow - 22 hours ago
Ermmm we used the copper nanotube paint once on an office
and, well, it sucked. Bad. Cell phones only worked in this
small corner of the office, and wifi was chaotic. Something
about signals can't get in, but they also can't get out, so
they collide ...
swiley - 22 hours ago
I think the word you're looking for is "reflect."
Overtonwindow - 18 hours ago
Yes, thank you. Reflect. It created considerable
interference.
samstave - 22 hours ago
If Howard had known of this paint, then he wouldn't have had to
put Mylar all over his house and look like a kook! Jimmy
wouldn't have had to do so much to help him out... maybe he'd
still be alive!
c3534l - 22 hours ago
Isn't there RF-blocking wallets? Seems like something I'd
probably buy if I had an identity worth stealing.
eridius - 22 hours ago
I have one of those and it's kind of a PITA. I actually
didn't realize it blocked RF until after I bought it. It's
annoying because I can't just tap my wallet on the MUNI gates
or the card reader at work, I have to open up the damn thing
and press the edge of the card poking out of the card holder
against it and hope it works (sometimes it does, sometimes I
have to pull out the card).
cookiecaper - 22 hours ago
I probably just have too much junk in my wallet, but I
can't ever just tap the wallet against an NFC reader
anyway. It either doesn't read anything or it reads one of
the other low-power NFC cards contained (I think I have
3-4). For quick access to a single card maybe you can get a
lanyard or one of those retracty thingies people wear
around their belt loops?
eksemplar - 22 hours ago
Well, if I was doing security at your company, I'd probably
want employee credentials to be visible at all times, which
would also happen to take care of your problem.
emidln - 22 hours ago
Employee credentials should not be visible when the
employee isn't inside a secured area. If you work at a
site with a Security Officer, try inviting them out to
lunch and not hiding your credentials. See if they care.
QuantumGravy - 22 hours ago
> "Why not just build a faraday cage?"Then my very next thought
is, "Who is going to notice my house-sized faraday cage, who
are they going to tell, and what are those people going to do
in turn?"
sillysaurus3 - 22 hours ago
Lan party.
dom0 - 21 hours ago
Actually RF shielding paint is very poor. Manufacturers
advertise them with "99.5 %" or so, which equates a measly 20
dB. Additionally, correctly applying these is quite difficult,
and incorrect application greatly diminishes the shielding.
(You also need to cover everything, including ceiling and
floor, not just the walls). Even when correctly applied, the
attenuation is so weak, a cell phone will still work. Shielded
facilities are built differently and are far more expensive
than shielding paint.RF dead chambers are bloody expensive for
a reason: you can't emulate them by pasting some paint on a
wall.
rayiner - 21 hours ago
One of my first jobs was building shielded boxes for a
sensitive RF measurement setup. Containing the RF output from
something like a laptop is hard. I lined the inside of the
boxes with copper beryllium mesh (attached with glue, since
nails become little antennas), soldered all the joints to
ensure electrical continuity, and put a copper beryllium
gasket all around the lid to make sure there was continuity
when the box was closed.
gpm - 21 hours ago
> RF dead chambers are bloody expensive for a reason: you
can't emulate them by pasting some paint on a wall.Couldn't
you just stick yourself in a metal box (with a metal door
that is careful to get a good seal)?
fnj - 14 hours ago
How do you propose to breathe in there?
gpm - 13 hours ago
By opening the door when not in use.If you need
continuous use, two rooms. One that acts as an "airlock"
with an outer door that is open only when the door to the
other room is closed. Battery operated fans and lights
used as necessary.Note that the "inner room" might be as
small as a ammo crate depending on your use case.
dom0 - 21 hours ago
Well yeah, that's what those chambers are. Except it's a
bit more complicated to do than "just" :)
erikb - 18 hours ago
The smartest reaction I've read so far. But if you learn to know
the Director of Cloud, miss Greene, it gets less scary. She
believes in a eat-or-be-eaten world as we live in today, an
argument like energy friendly data centers would still be a
thing. She might've just done it because it's the right thing to
do.We must keep an open eye though for the moment when she gets
fired and replaced by a shark, like when she got fired from
VMWare.
eatbitseveryday - 22 hours ago
My educated guess would be that given the proliferation of
services offered by Google, it indeed has many more sources of
information on each individual, and having email as one of them
perhaps proves less beneficial today as it did when Gmail was
first introduced. Now there is the Android OS which gives
information about apps you use, locations, activities, and online
searches, map queries, bookmarks, sentiments via G+, etc. So, it
can disable auto-scanning of emails perhaps as a PR move (or,
should I hope it is going to eventually evolve its email service
to include encrypting emails, and this is one step in that
direction??).
cookiecaper - 22 hours ago
Yep, I agree. Email is not really a good channel for analysis
anyway since it has a very high signal-to-noise ratio. A lot of
kids who've grown up in the texting era think that email is for
old fogies and rely solely on shorter-form messages via
Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, and/or SMS, so their emails are
almost pure noise and no conversational content.Google's new
problem is "How do we get access to the contents of these new
communication channels so we can continue to read peoples'
conversations?". Those new channels are walled gardens and you
can't just create a new email client and say "Switch to GInsta
for your Instagrams! We give you 2GB of storage!" Unlike the
switch to Gmail, the switch to GInsta would represent a hard
barrier to the "true" Instagram network.Google is becoming the
new MS; losing relevance with the younger crowd who are all
about "social" platforms, and becoming more and more an
enterprise sales model. What happens when Facebook goes after
web search?
Pxtl - 22 hours ago
They own tracking cookie ad systems and can tie your tracking
cookies to your gmail account pretty trivially.Basically, they
have your browser history, and can tie that to your real world
ID.Your email is pretty trivial compared to your browser
history.
vermontdevil - 22 hours ago
From the article:" But instead of scanning a user?s email, the
ads will now be targeted with other personal information Google
already pulls from sources such as search and YouTube. "
ecesena - 22 hours ago
It's also prob not the best source of features (in a ML sense)
for choosing ads.When you read an email, your intent is either
to understand what the sender is asking you (new email), or get
the info you asked for (response to your email).In the majority
of cases a contextual ad is 1. pretty weird, 2. pretty against
your primary intent.Might as well showing you ads related to
your recent browsing history, imo.
linkregister - 20 hours ago
I see it as an opportunity to use ML to improve targeting.
Ad clicks could be used as the training data since users are
less likely to click on non-relevant or inappropriate ads.
This would help with avoiding inappropriate keywords, e.g.
death in the family.
icebraining - 22 hours ago
The article explains it plainly: they weren't getting the
message to business people that Gmail on Google Apps isn't
scanned despite free Gmail being, so they stopped scanning
Gmail altogether.
dsp1234 - 22 hours ago
stopped scanning Gmail altogether.Note that this is not what
the article says. It says that they stopped scanning Gmail
for ads, but does not say they stopped scanning email for
non-ad purposes.
kinkrtyavimoodh - 22 hours ago
Any spam filtering implies scanning right? (Unless the
filtering is purely on basis of headers and other non-
message-body info)
fishywang - 22 hours ago
It depends on whether you consider mail headers part of
the email. I personally think scanning mail headers still
counts as scanning email.
secabeen - 22 hours ago
Well yeah. They have to scan content for you to
effectively search your own email, which is one of their
flagship features.
dsp1234 - 19 hours ago
I can't edit the above, but the context I meant was non-
ad, non-email purposes.
chippy - 22 hours ago
To be more accurate the article says they stopped scanning
for ads that appear inside gmail. Whether they still scan
emails in the free gmail for use outside gmail is unknown,
but I may be being pedantic...
joshuamorton - 22 hours ago
(disclosure, I work on gmail, although nothing related to
ads)I can't find a citation, but I'm fairly confident
that that's never been the case. Ad targeting from emails
has always been siloed to within gmail. To quote the
post:>Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned
for any ads personalization after this change.That's
pretty unequivocal.
chippy - 6 hours ago
Thanks!
eatbitseveryday - 22 hours ago
I agree - I read the article. But having many sources to feed
the ads probably made the decision to announce universally
that emails are no longer going to be scanned easier to do in
the first place.
smeyer - 22 hours ago
Didn't they also get caught a couple of times scanning the
email despite saying they weren't? I know there was a lawsuit
alleging that they scanned the email of many university
students after saying they wouldn't [0], which I think was
settled for high 3 or low 4 figures per person, although I'm
not sure (and wasn't a participant).[0]
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/3/23/alumni-
lawsuit-a...
fav_collector - 22 hours ago
> Now there is the Android OSDoes the actual OS track you or is
it individual apps?
eatbitseveryday - 20 hours ago
The "Web & App Activity" in http://myaccount.google.com
states the following:> Google can save information like:> -
Websites and apps you use> - Your activity on websites and in
apps that use Google services
hoschicz - 17 hours ago
The Google Play Services package that is pre-installed on
basically every Android phone with Google Play tracks you.
samstave - 22 hours ago
Hah. I came here to basically say the same:"They have such a
strong baseline of the predilections of their users, and by
association with those they regularly communicate - by their
overlapping interests and behaviors, googles ad dossier on any
given user is complete enough to no longer read the drivel one
sends to another to predict your future choices.
[deleted]
losteric - 22 hours ago
Perhaps you should ;) Google is a corporation, my immediate
reaction was "They must've developed something more profitable" -
and they have, they're continuing to compete with MS/AWS for
business customers.
tambourine_man - 22 hours ago
Same. I completed the headline in my head with "because they
don't need to anymore".
zeep - 17 hours ago
That or they will have someone else read the emails for them...
like the NSA. Also, all "cloud" emails older than 6 months don't
require a warrant to be obtained [1].1.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/congress...
nerdiiee - 9 hours ago
How many of you have successfully prevented Google and Facebook for
tracking your web habits ? What all steps do you take to prevent
the tracking ?
nether - 22 hours ago
Switch to Protonmail.
siliconc0w - 21 hours ago
I think there is some interesting middle ground where you could use
machine learning to go from 'show only relevant ads' to 'show only
ads you might actually click on with greater than .001
probability'. I guess this is like 'extreme' outlier detection but
it'd be interesting to see what revenue the ads at the 'long tail'
of likelihood generate anyway. My guess the bulk of it is from the
standard high CPC stuff like Mortages and Insurance. Google says
it does this but i'm not too sure - I've never intentionally
clicked an adword and yet they're still shown to me.Anyway this may
solve the tragedy of the commons situation we're in now and allow
us to move away from the technology war of ad blockers, ad blocker
blockers, ad blocker blocker blockers, etc.edit: removed comment on
clarity of Gsuite vs Free due to downvote brigade.
rory096 - 21 hours ago
Seems pretty clear to me. GSuite never had email
scanning.>Alphabet Inc.?s Google Cloud sells a package of office
software, called G Suite, that competes with market leader
Microsoft Corp. Paying Gmail users never received the email-
scanning ads like the free version of the program, but some
business customers were confused by the distinction and its
privacy implications, said Diane Greene, Google?s senior vice
president of cloud. ?What we?re going to do is make it
unambiguous,? she said.
guyzero - 21 hours ago
Per Diane Greene's post, this has always been the case for GSuite
and now consumer Gmail will catch up:"Consumer Gmail content will
not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this
change"https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-
in...
DrewHintz - 21 hours ago
"Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads
personalization after this change."Original post:
https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-
in...Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on this.
gpribeiro - 21 hours ago
> Paying Gmail users never received the email-scanning ads like
the free version of the program, but some business customers were
confused by the distinction and its privacy implications, said
Diane Greene, Google?s senior vice president of cloud.Google
doesn't read e-mails from GSuite. So the change is to stop
reading from Gmail's free accounts.
hilyen - 22 hours ago
Good for them. Though it goes without saying email is insecure. If
enterprise clients dislike an algorithm scanning their email
contents, maybe they should also consider that email generally has
unencrypted transit and storage.
bitJericho - 22 hours ago
Very few servers store/transmit emails unencrypted...
icebraining - 22 hours ago
Not that few - more than 1 in 10 emails sent and received by
Gmail are unencrypted:
https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/saferemail/
bitJericho - 22 hours ago
That's higher than I would have expected. The question
though, is who is not allowing encrypted emails? I wonder if
it's mostly just China.
netheril96 - 15 hours ago
Looking at the data (https://www.google.com/transparencyrep
ort/saferemail/#region...). The major Chinese players QQ
and 163 do employ TLS, while the worst offenders of
security are mostly Japanese.The Chinese government can
just ask QQ and 163 for your email such that they don't
need to see it in transit. Less work, too.
rasz - 20 hours ago
Will they also stop tracking clicked links in gmail?
ziikutv - 1 hours ago
Some of my emails are "read" (as in shown as I have read them)
when I have literally just received them. Is this referring to the
same thing?
VMG - 22 hours ago
Hope this increases the chance of E2E encryption
JumpCrisscross - 22 hours ago
How would you search your inbox? Or filter spam?
zeep - 20 hours ago
this could be done locally, it doesn't use that much processing
power
gruez - 20 hours ago
It can probabky be done if you're using a email client.
Webapp (like gmail)? Probably not feasible because of how
much data you need to download every time.
zeep - 17 hours ago
if only they would offer that option... at least for the
android client
mtgx - 21 hours ago
https://protonmail.com/blog/encrypted-email-spam-filtering/I
remember there was a recent paper that dealt with this, too,
but I can't find it right now. But it basically demolished this
argument that it's impossible to stop spam if the email is
encrypted.
jcranmer - 21 hours ago
That blog post doesn't actually say anything about how they
do spam filtering on encrypted emails. Everything they talk
about is bog-standard spam filtering, including comparing
against known spam and Bayesian filtering, both of which are
impossible to do on encrypted emails. It's not clear if
they're doing reputation analysis, which is the other big
anti-spam measure impossible on encrypted email (I suspect
it's the main component of their "we're not telling you what
we're doing"). The SPF/DKIM/DMARC and blacklist checks are
the only things you can reliably do on encrypted email.They
do say "In future blog posts, we will cover the challenges of
preventing ProtonMail from being used by spammers and the
challenges of doing spam filtering with end-to-end encrypted
emails which we cannot read", but I can't find any such blog
posts.
Propen - 19 hours ago
WhatsApp also had a session at F8 about e2ee spam
filtering...https://developers.facebook.com/videos/f8-2017
/how-whatsapp-...
sebastian - 18 hours ago
Some type of proof?of?work for email addresses that have not
been previously white-listed. Similar to what BitMessage
does[1].Sending emails to new/random contacts shouldn't be that
easy anyway.[1] https://bitmessage.org/bitmessage.pdf
e12e - 17 hours ago
Encrypting email to a single recipient is (a weak) proof of
work.There's a big difference between sending 10k copies of a
plaintext email, and retrieving a public key and encrypting
to 10k recipients - not to mention that filtering out all non
signed/not-signed-by-trusted-key should be a decent start for
a whitelist/greylist.I'd be curious if anyone ever got gpg-
encrypted spam?
ATsch - 16 hours ago
Well, I doubt anyone gets GPG encrypted spam, because only
a small number of people actually know how to decrypt GPG.
sebastian - 13 hours ago
Another approach would be to have to pay the equivalent of
USD 5-10 cents in some email crypto currency in order to
allow an unknown sender to put their email on my inbox. If
I reply or add the sender to my whitelist the fee is
automatically refunded to the original sender and future
messages between both parties would won't require a
transaction fee any longer.
tareqak - 22 hours ago
You could search and filter after decryption (there are
implementation issues with both for sure, but it is technically
possible).
keganunderwood - 22 hours ago
Using metadata? Headers? Anything other than Tue email body
would be nice. We still have blacklisting by IP and stuff like
that.I mean if I write a Nigerian prince email and send it to
my mum, it should reach her no matter what the text says,
right?
softawre - 21 hours ago
Should it reach her though? What if I hacked your account
and sent it via you? Or should metadata detect that?
[deleted]
CaptSpify - 22 hours ago
Maybe having e2e is more important to some people than
searching or spam filtering.Personally, I'd like to have the
option, but as I don't, I don't use gmail.
jMyles - 22 hours ago
Homomorphic encryption is on the way! Right?(Right?)
hkmurakami - 22 hours ago
Won't people keep assuming gmail reads their emails at this point
though?
itiman - 21 hours ago
The fact of reading emails for ads is disputable even if it's used
for a new purpose, YT.
itiman - 20 hours ago
HAL: Ads will continue to appear inside the free version of
Gmail, as promoted messages. But instead of scanning a user?s
email, the ads will now be targeted with other personal
information Google already pulls from sources such as search and
YouTube.
Kluny - 7 hours ago
Gosh, thanks.
[deleted]
patkai - 18 hours ago
Google will stop reading my emails for Gmail ads because I will
stop using Gmail. It's kind of a sad story, because they are the
good guys, but once they built a huge company they started to focus
on maintaining it, possibly at any cost. This is a cautionary tale:
power corrupts. You, me, everyone. And yes, the web will produce
dictators we never imagined possible, because the Internet is so
powerful it will enable them.
sqeaky - 17 hours ago
I agree that the web is extremely powerful.I also think this
power is symmetric in who it enables. Unlike land ownership or TV
broadcasting entry isn't expensive and the needed tools can
easily be smuggled. Anyone can easily gain immensely from this
free-flowing font of knowledge and communication.A potential
dictator must take great pains to use gain that huge power in the
Internet era and I think you are right that we will see some
insanely powerful dictators. However, I think we see fewer than
in previous eras though.
chenster - 32 minutes ago
Even though it never really bothered me because Apple Mail does not
pull anything but the actual email message from Gmail, so I never
see them, I still would like G to stop scanning anything personal.
Period.
mavhc - 22 hours ago
Wonder if it's also a move that will help encrypted email become
supported
MarkMc - 22 hours ago
OK but will Google stop reading my email for other types of ads?For
example, if I write "I love coffee" in an email, am I more likely
to see a Starbucks ad when I visit watch a YouTube video?
kolemcrae - 21 hours ago
Wee yeah - it says they will no longer scan emails.... Instead
they will use your youtube data, search data, website visit data
etc.
CobrastanJorji - 20 hours ago
In addition, I suspect, given that every time you walk into a
Starbucks your phone is probably connecting to the network
"Google Starbucks", that they probably know how you feel about
coffee.
RichLewis007 - 22 hours ago
It's about time! I wonder if this is due to the fact that if email
encryption becomes common, the content will be inaccessible to
Google anyway.
sigjuice - 21 hours ago
How many people have you seen who exchange encrypted email on a
regular basis (or even at all)?
eli - 22 hours ago
I doubt it. That's a pretty big "if".
Spivak - 21 hours ago
If they're not using it for ads, there's a good chance that
it's in Google's best interest to not know the contents of
people's email. It lessens the impact of a potential breach,
and it greatly simplifies their responses to gov't requests to
'we have no method to access this data, you must contact the
account holder directly'.
netheril96 - 15 hours ago
And then Google gets inundated from angry customers who
forget their password or key for the encryption of their
emails.
daveheq - 16 hours ago
Actually I'd prefer they did so they can optimize their cash flow
and my targeted ads so I can continue using their free product and
all it's nice features without any compromise.
drusepth - 17 hours ago
Will there still be a way to opt-in?This seems like one of those
decisions that is a net negative for functionality in favor of
quelling some misguided privacy concerns. Hopefully this doesn't
lessen the quality of ads by much.
bootlooped - 16 hours ago
This is the first time I've ever heard a person worry about the
quality of the ads that are served to them.
crazygringo - 14 hours ago
I've often wondered why nobody brings this up more.If you're
going to see ads for things, why on earth wouldn't you want
them to try to better target you? The whole point is for you to
find out about things that might be useful for you.Why would I
want less of the useful things? Why would I want worse
advertising?
thinkingemote - 5 hours ago
I think the question is what is advertising. Is it a service
that educates or is it an intrusion that attempts to sell
things? Is it both things?Why do some people dislike
advertising? Is it only that they are unmatched? Are there
other reasons. If you wish to find an answer to your
wondering, wonder on those issues.
mtgx - 22 hours ago
So much for the argument "how else is Google going to make money if
it isn't reading your emails?!"Companies can make money without
tracking you 24/7 and reading all of your private content. They
just choose not to, because it's easier, and then spread the
propaganda that those things are "needed" to stay in business.
kinkrtyavimoodh - 22 hours ago
Uhh, this defense would work better for a company that does not
make like 90% of its multi-billion-dollar revenue selling ads.
JeremyBanks - 22 hours ago
Google can stop reading your emails because they track you so
well you elsewhere. You wouldn't want to cite this example.
[deleted]
[deleted]
[deleted]
ForFreedom - 11 hours ago
So what method have they adopted to display adverts in emails?
wdr1 - 10 hours ago
It's literally in the article.
[deleted]
cm2012 - 22 hours ago
That sucks for me as an advertiser. Gmail ads were great for B2B
marketing.
criddell - 22 hours ago
I didn't think there were any ads in their business email.
cm2012 - 20 hours ago
There isn't, but most business folks use free gmail for their
usual accounts.
openplatypus - 18 hours ago
> most business folksYou have no idea how wrong you are.
cm2012 - 17 hours ago
Nonetheless, Gmail ads are great for B2B advertising at
scale.
greglindahl - 22 hours ago
This is referring to whether you see ads for hemorrhoid
medication all over the Internets after talking about them in
an email.
telcodud - 19 hours ago
As the founder and CTO of Blekko search engine, one would
imagine that you would be familiar with Google's personalized
advertising policies:
https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/143465?hl=en
(Found through a quick Google search)
dragonwriter - 22 hours ago
They aren't stopping Gmail ads, they are just stopping using
Gmail content as an input signal for ad personalization.
cm2012 - 22 hours ago
That's what makes them effective though. Otherwise its the same
as any other GDN site.
[deleted]
B1FF_PSUVM - 20 hours ago
Advertising spend should be taxed at 100% (or 500%, whatever),
just for the damage it does.Of course it is not. We're ruled by
advertisers.
wand3r - 22 hours ago
Man I am super sorry my basic privacy are getting in the way of
your marketing effort.Edit: removed "rights"
dragonwriter - 22 hours ago
To be fair, your ?basic privacy rights? have nothing to do with
this, it's about simplifying Google's efforts to sell services
(which weren't actually effected by this anyway, but perception
is a different thing than reality) to enterprise customers.
robotresearcher - 22 hours ago
Google can't read your post office mail. It can't read your
Yahoo mail. But you certainly have no right that says it can't
read your Gmail mail.You're confusing a want with a right.
Markoff - 1 hours ago
Thank you EU.
andrepd - 22 hours ago
How do you know? That's the problem with closed source software,
and software that runs in someone else's computer. You have no idea
what it does. You aren't in control. Someone else is deciding what
code runs on your computer. That's a problem.
criddell - 22 hours ago
Even open source products still are running on largely closed
systems. When has Intel ever let people see what's going on under
the covers?The late 1970's was probably the last time anybody
truly understood 100% of what was going on in any system.The
bottom line is that you have to trust some people. I totally
understand those that don't trust Google. I happen to trust them
today.
mattlondon - 21 hours ago
Except web-based (or "cloud" now I guess) services like gmail are
not running on your computers (apart from the javascript, but you
can see that so you should be happy).In this case it is google's
code running on google's computers.
sedachv - 20 hours ago
> In this case it is google's code running on google's
computers.Which is mostly based on Free Software, starting with
GNU/Linux. The Affero General Public License is intended to
disallow this loophole of "it is only running on our servers,
hence we are technically not distributing it, so we do not have
to release the code":
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html
seangrogg - 22 hours ago
How do you know they were ever reading your email to begin with?
Maybe they were never reading your email and this is just a
publicity stunt to backtrack on an unpopular decision that they
never actually made.
icebraining - 22 hours ago
Cue discussion of how with open source you don't really know
either, since nobody can read and find out all the backdoors in
the source of the whole system.
zyxzkz - 22 hours ago
This seems like a ridiculously paranoid worldview to have.
CaptSpify - 22 hours ago
I'd argue it's extremely naive to not have that world-view.
Especially given all the evidence of closed-source software
doing things like this in the past.
naiveattack - 21 hours ago
- no ads based on scanning emails- no scanning emailsAre
different things
mrisoli - 21 hours ago
Big companies can't hide this stuff forever, you can eventually
figure out, it is just better business-wise for them to just
state they read your emails for ads, it can cost them a lot if
they don't, plus most people don't really care.A few weeks ago a
friend and I were talking exclusively through WhatsApp about a
trip to London(in Portuguese with our very unusual jargon), I
didn't do any search for anything related it was all within our
conversation, a couple days later Facebook had a post on my
timeline saying: "heading to London? Check what your friends did
there".I don't remember reading anywhere that WhatsApp reads your
conversations for ads, but it was clear to me that's where they
got the information, it was spooky at first.
andrepd - 11 hours ago
That is actually an interesting argument, that they don't lie
about this because if it ever came out they would be in deep
shit.Speaking of which, I had a similarly creepy moment just
yesterday. I was watching an episode of the Simpsons, and
wanted to Google the Bart blackboard gag in the intro because I
didn't get it. Just I type the first word and it immediately
suggested the rest. Very creepy because I wasn't watching
through any Google service (on an Android phone though).
MajesticHobo - 21 hours ago
WhatsApp doesn't read your conversations for ads because it
can't. Message content is end-to-end encrypted. You must have
leaked your plans through some other medium inadvertently.
sedachv - 20 hours ago
This is called retargeting and is even worse from a privacy
perspective: now your data is going through multiple layers
of ad buying tools, analytics, ad exchanges, aggregators, ad
networks, etc.: http://2bd2y2367xnj3kpntjsifzmf-wpengine
.netdna-ssl.com/wp-c...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavior
al_retargeting
funnyfacts365 - 5 hours ago
Oh, the doublespeak... They will read your emails for everything
else, like Google Now, just not to show you ads. ahahahahahahahah
kentosi - 22 hours ago
I don't understand why there isn't an option for me to pay for
Google to remove ads from gmail.I've already paid for Youtube Red
and couldn't be happier.
deelowe - 22 hours ago
There is. It's called gsuite.
mtgx - 21 hours ago
Were they really not scanning your emails on those accounts, or
is it like the education market fiasco, where it kept reading
students' emails?
UnoriginalGuy - 19 hours ago
That isn't the same thing.Outlook.com offers "Premium" which
removes ads. If you stop paying you just get the ads back but
your account is otherwise unaffected[0].Gsuite on the other
hand removes ads, but if you stop paying then you lose access
to your email and additional messages may bounce.Apples and
oranges.[0] https://w2.outlook.com/l/upsell
SN76477 - 22 hours ago
https://gsuite.google.com/products/gmail/About $60 a yearI have
about 8 accounts that I use.
LeifCarrotson - 20 hours ago
I have one for myself, and one for my wife, and find the
$120/year a hefty price to pay for...email. It doesn't even
include the registration of my personal domain, and it doesn't
include web hosting. Google Apps is pretty nice, and it feels
good to be paying for the product instead of being the product
- though I am skeptical that my $10/month would let me talk to
a human if something went wrong.I'm considering moving;
Rackspace has pretty good hosted email for $2/user/month. We
use it at work - webmail is acceptable though nothing to write
home about, and their IMAP implementation is solid so you can
just use a client.But you pay $480/year for 8 email addresses?
Ouch.
markdown - 19 hours ago
> I am skeptical that my $10/month would let me talk to a
human if something went wrong.I have received exceptional
support over the years, including them calling me twice when
I reported an issue. My account is worth $5/month and I live
in Fiji.
Flammy - 18 hours ago
Agreed.I've had to contact support a few times in the last
few months for coworkers email issues. We're a very small
company paying $5 per month.To contact:
https://admin.google.com/AdminHome then help button -->
Contact support
alphonsegaston - 22 hours ago
It says it's exempt from ads in this specific context, but is
it actually free of their data mining? If they still use the
data to track and push whatever they're selling you in other
contexts, the presence of the ads themselves is an ancillary
concern.
ma2rten - 21 hours ago
According to the article it is.
alphonsegaston - 21 hours ago
Right, I read it. But it's still not actually clear to me
whether they are ceasing ALL mining of email data for
business accounts, or are just not funneling it to a
specific set of ad programs. To me, at least, that seems an
important point of clarification.
crazygringo - 20 hours ago
They're not ceasing it for business accounts, they've
never done it for business accounts. The article is about
free Gmail accounts.If you look at the terms for G Suite
(the paid business product), that is a top selling point.
Businesses who pay for G Suite don't want Google using
their data for anything, and Google complies.Edit: in
response to comment below, here are the main docs
describing, including the Data Processing
Amendment:https://gsuite.google.com/learn-more/security
/security-white...https://support.google.com/googlecloud/
answer/6056650?hl=enhttps://gsuite.google.com/terms/dpa_t
erms.html
alphonsegaston - 20 hours ago
I'm really not trying to be pedantic, but that's not what
the article says. It says that Google never data-mined
business accounts to serve ads, not that they never data-
mine business accounts under any circumstances. If that's
true, and you can point to marketing or a service
agreement that outlines these terms, I'd be happy to know
and will gladly buy a paid account.EDIT:I think these are
the terms and I don't seem to see this guarantee, but IAN
ALhttps://gsuite.google.com/intl/en_in/terms/2013/1/premi
er_te...https://gsuite.google.com/intl/en-
GB/terms/emea_reseller_pre...
aiiane - 19 hours ago
You'd probably have to be more specific about what you're
defining as "mining".
alphonsegaston - 18 hours ago
Essentially, scanning the data for anything unrelated to
providing the service itself. I know this is a little
murky with their suite, but if the data is being used in
a way elsewhere (e.g. to train models for other services
or collecting data in expectation that it could be useful
to a Google app I haven't signed on with), that should be
made explicit
halflings - 20 hours ago
From the G Cloud FAQ [0]:> Google Cloud does not scan your
data or email in G Suite Services for advertising purposes.
Our automated systems scan and index your data to provide you
with your services and to protect your data, such as to
perform spam and malware detection, to sort email for
features like Priority Inbox and to return fast, powerful
search results when users search for information in their
accounts. The situation is different for our free offerings
and the consumer space.[0]
https://support.google.com/googlecloud/answer/6056650?hl=en
joosters - 19 hours ago
This hardly frees you from Google's data gathering. They will
have records of your IP address used to collect the emails and
your access history, so they know (roughly) where you live,
what times of day you are active, and can probably infer stuff
like when you are on holiday. If you are in the same house as
someone else, they probably use Google too and the shared IP
address lets Google tie the two identities together. So they
get to discover your relationships too.
briandear - 16 hours ago
Isn?t that assuming you are using the web mail and not en
email client?
jonknee - 15 hours ago
OP asked for no ads, not for an email host that knows nothing
about its users... (Which can have its perks if someone tries
to hack your account.)
askvictor - 17 hours ago
So will any host. When you are paying for it though, the
terms of service clearly define what is collected and what
it's used for, and you can choose to enable or disable that
type of data matching
newscracker - 9 hours ago
Slightly off topic: I was very annoyed that this article
didn't provide any links to Google's official statement/declaration
about this change and when it's coming. Even if Bloomberg
interviewed Diane Green for this article or asked questions and got
official statements, it could've still provided an official link
for the change. I found the link [1] here on HN.[1]:
https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
redthrowaway - 19 hours ago
I suspect that means they no longer need to, and have better ways
of targeting ads at you.
fernyherrera - 21 hours ago
word
ethanpil - 22 hours ago
Does that mean that Google now has no more use for Gmail, and soon
millions of people will be scrambling to cover yet another product
sunset?That would certainly cause an enormous loss of goodwill,
but.... imagine this scenario:Google has some slow growth quarters,
they need to keep the numbers up for shareholders. They start to
examine what they can squeeze. Gmail costs them X (hundreds?)
millions per year, but doesn't gain much from it...Certainly its
unlikely, as it is also a SSO tool, etc. Still....
kingbirdy - 22 hours ago
Considering gmail is a major part of google apps as well, I
imagine they're making plenty of money off of it
[deleted]
seangrogg - 22 hours ago
I significantly doubt it. It's ubiquitous internally. It's a
major selling point of GSuite. It'll likely remain one of
Google's biggest ad-serving faces outside of Search.They may get
rid of one of their applications (gmail OR inbox), but I doubt
they'd get rid of the entire platform. They'd lose more revenue
than they'd recover.
[deleted]
myrandomcomment - 19 hours ago
So this never really bugged me. It is a damn good free service. I
also love how it picks up on plane tickets, hotel reservations, etc
and puts them in the calendar. Makes life simpler.If ad companies
fix something please fix the I searched for something and bought it
but I get adds for it for the next 4 weeks. That bugs me.
aembleton - 17 hours ago
Frustratingly, by reading my emails Google should know that I've
bought something and so don't need ads about it.But hey, they
don't seem to have used that data.
everythingswan - 13 hours ago
At that point, it's on the advertiser. It's a weird dynamic
where they want to enable the advertiser to factor that in and
not advertise to you, but they want to maximize rev and
imperfect advertisers increases rev.( = edit for grammar)
[deleted]
[deleted]
skrause - 22 hours ago
I never understood the argument that some automatic scanning for
keywords is like "reading" your mail. By that same logic isn't
Gmail's spam filter still "reading" your mail? It is classifying
your mail based on content after all...
fullshark - 18 hours ago
Users like spam filtering, don't like ads.
dingaling - 22 hours ago
It's like my accountant reading my receipts to create my tax
return versus a sleazy salesman sneaking a peek at them to find
new ways to sell me stuff.
cybrjoe - 22 hours ago
It's more like your accountant preparing your tax return for
free in exchange for aggregating data about your receipts and
offering you goods and services you may be interested in.
skrebbel - 22 hours ago
> and offering you goods and services you may be interested
in.Sounds like a sleazy salesman to me.
belorn - 6 hours ago
If its about offering me goods and services that I may be
interested in, then ad blocking is a useful feature for both
me and the advertiser. If I am not interested in any goods or
services then no offering or aggregation is needed.On the
other hand, if its about offering me good and services which
other companies want me to become interested in, then we have
a different deal going on.
gitlabuser - 21 hours ago
Here's a real life example. It's like Credit Karma who
prepares your tax return for free, but then uses the info to
help target you for ads on credit cards, loans, etc.[this is
exactly happening]
ouid - 22 hours ago
Let's split the difference. It's like your accountant
preparing your tax return in exchange for using that tax
return to develop a model of your spending habits. The value
of this model is more than the cost of them doing your tax
returns, and in fact is such that if you were simply to
collect that data yourself, sell it on the open market, and
spend a portion of the proceeds on the tax prep service, you
would end up with profit, and the tax prep service would
still exist.
tajen - 19 hours ago
...Are you aware it would be quite a worthy idea, offering
an accountant in exchange of business data?
rconti - 21 hours ago
I'm sorry, I'm from Slashdot. Can you write this in the
form of a car analogy?
Zhenya - 19 hours ago
I think this EXACT thing is what Credit Karma is doing with
free tax returns:https://www.creditkarma.com/tax
KaoruAoiShiho - 18 hours ago
No way that's true. The data is not worth as much as the
eyeball on the ad itself.
ouid - 17 hours ago
gmail can still advertise to me in the hypothetical
scenario above, but if they want to do so in a targeted
way, they would have to buy my data from me first.
dmix - 21 hours ago
> The value of this model is more than the cost of them
doing your tax returnsIt's likely the value Google got out
of scanning your email wasn't worth that much in terms of
modelling profiles for ads.Probably because having both
your search history and "anonymized" Google analytics, plus
the sea of data that comes from owning Android is more than
enough data that Google/Doubleclick needs.From a purely
capitalist perspective I'd bet the utility of them scraping
this data no longer outweighs the privacy costs.But at the
same time Google is still scanning attachments for child
porn and likely other data out of national security
interests. And they still can access your data on a case-
by-case basis which from a FISA perspective is a rubber-
stamp away from accessing your data from 2 hops away from
someone who may or may not have done something bad.I
personally will not weigh using Google vs any other email
service in terms of privacy any different after this
measure. But I still appreciate their efforts to reduce the
"standard pratice" nature of scanning private email. If I
do use anything Google-related I will not associate my
personal identity in any way with the service, which is
still requirement for Google play.You can still use a fake
gmail account and prepaid Google gift cards bought with
cash to disassociate your identity from using the service.
Although that's still well beyond the investment the
majority of people are willing to make.Regardless privacy
comes at a cost these days. Good OPSEC > trusting cloud
services privacy policy. You can either not use the
services or invest in protecting your data when using
them.I will still cheer on Google's efforts to make those
of us who care about privacy live's easier. I'm not naive
enough to ignore how their business model works but that
doesn't mean they always have to take the easy route and
hand everything over without considering the costs - as
many ISP/Telecom companies seem to do.
ouid - 21 hours ago
I disagree with you, but from the perspective that my
email contains the history of every transaction I have
ever made, all of the newsletters I sign up to, and, for
another 3 days, ~50% of my conversations, since I do a
good chunk of my communicating over gChat.Consumer
preferences change over time, so google is far more
interested in the thing I bought yesterday than the thing
I bought 4 months ago, so being able to read my emails is
still a current interest of theirs.
cpeterso - 21 hours ago
Amazon's receipt emails stopped including an itemized
breakdown. Perhaps this is for customer privacy or
perhaps so Google can no longer scrape Gmail users'
purchase histories.
brewdad - 20 hours ago
True, but seeing as I often order one thing or two at a
time, the email subject line from Amazon still gives away
the goods
mrybczyn - 21 hours ago
Eh? That assumption of "not associating my personal
identity" doesn't actually work. Your profile IS your
personal identity, and can be associated trivially. If
not algorithmically, then via one connecting piece of
information supplied by various databases and no such
agencies. You're living in a dream.
dmix - 21 hours ago
> Your profile IS your personal identity, and can be
associated trivially.I'm hardly new to his stuff and to
say it's trivial is nonsense. Most people make it trivial
but it's not trivial to associate identities of people
who put basic effort into obscuring them.Merely
disconnecting your primary profiles from your online
activity is enough to throw most mass-surveillance/drag-
net stuff off, aka 99.9% of advertising firms and most
government programs.If you're an activist or someone
interested in keeping your internet activity private then
the bar is far higher (and the targets of which are ever
expanding as governments and private organizations get
better at this stuff). FBI agents, or likewise in your
country of residence, have plenty of forensic tools at
their disposal to connect disparate identities. It takes
some real time investment and requires being super
careful to evade these measures. But I'm not talking
about that here. I mean the average person in 2017.I've
personally done the total anonymity stuff as an
experiment so I know what that takes.Having studied many
documents from the various global national security
organizations and being fortunate to have dated a defense
attorney in the past who engaged with police surveillance
reports on a daily basis for their work I'm convinced
that even basic privacy measures such as never using your
real identity when using internet services, creating full
legitimate sounding backstories (and subsequent online
profiles) for your fake identity, and changing the ID you
use often enough will throw off most basic surveillance
measures.I'm not doing anything to get people really
invested in uncovering my online identities, as most
people aren't, which is what I'm talking about.The simple
fact is the vast, vast majority of people reuse the same
username (and passwords) across the internet and use
their real name and emails everywhere. So it's really not
hard to track people online from an LEO or 4chan doxxing
perspective.But I'm not convinced you have to be isolated
from the utility of most online (cloud) services. You
just have to invest in using them intelligently to not
associate your actual identity with the services.Ad
companies aren't interested in deanonymizing people
anyway. They are looking for low hanging fruit and there
are more than enough people to fill databases who fit
this profile. So I'm not that concerned about those who
don't.
mcbits - 18 hours ago
It's not trivial to match any arbitrary profile with an
offline identity, but it is possible to cluster
pseudonymous profiles into "almost certainly the same
individual" by patterns and peculiarities in how they use
their devices. If the same patterns later show up for an
identified user, they can be linked with high
probability.With the sites Google runs plus running their
own JavaScript on a sizable fraction of other people's
web pages, they can pick up a lot of patterns, many of
which would be inaccessible to police and intelligence
surveillance.Some people have nervous habits like moving
the mouse around, clicking/tapping on whitespace,
scrolling up and down, etc. Some always/never use the
scrollbar. Some always/never open links in new tabs. Some
tend to put the adjective before/after the noun in their
searches. Some will rapidly open up the first 5 search
results in new tabs. Some always disable instant search,
and some of those change their settings to 20 or 50 or
100 results. Some use search features like the
calculator, searching for "weather", stock symbols, etc,
and others never do.
teaneedz - 20 hours ago
> Ad companies aren't interested in deanonymizing people
anyway.Seems to me that there is a huge monetary aspect
to matching online activity with real
identity."deanonymizing" is trivial but ad tech is poison
to any level of "privacy", filter bubbles and fake news
propagation.
ErrantX - 21 hours ago
> if you were simply to collect that data yourself, sell it
on the open market, and spend a portion of the proceeds on
the tax prep service, you would end up with profit, and the
tax prep service would still exist.Economies of scale; the
market for that data would not exist if individuals
collected it themselves to sell. Hence would break
down.Phrased another way; this data about 1 person is
relatively valueless.(I like the rest of your example BTW;
just disagree with your conclusion)
md_ - 19 hours ago
> if you were simply to collect that data yourself, sell
it on the open market, and spend a portion of the proceeds
on the tax prep service, you would end up with profitHmm.
Could you sell it on the open market? If so--if the margins
for the ad-supported model like Google's are in fact as big
as they appear--why isn't there a Google competitor who
provides exactly the service you describe: some kind of
opt-in system where they collect data (via, say, a browser
extension), sell it to advertisers, and pay you a cut?One
generic answer to "why does the market not offer [some
seemingly reasonable thing]" is inefficiency: maybe there's
some cartel system at work where all major advertisers are
hoarding the revenue for themselves. But I find that pretty
unconvincing, since the whole market _seems_ to be
otherwise quite competitive, and with low barriers to
entry.Perhaps a more likely theory is that if you were to
offer a "we pay you for personal data" competitor, you'd
face massive fraud--a la click fraud--in which attackers
would pretend to be real users in order to get paid for
searching (or whatever), and that the subsequent need for
identity verification would become so burdensome as to eat
away any profits.Anyway, an interesting thought exercise,
but I think one can broadly conclude that either:1. There
are real obstacles to paying people the "fair" price for
their data, such that the current system is in fact fairer
than it appears. 2. The entire market is unfair due to a
cartel or similar (though like I said, I find this fairly
unconvincing). 3. This is a great idea and you're the
first to have it, so you should start a company that does
exactly this. ;)No?
posterboy - 15 hours ago
> Could you sell it on the open market?surely the profit
would be too small to fool anyone
slewis - 18 hours ago
Take a look at Basic Attention Token and the Brave
browser.
Markoff - 1 hours ago
can your accountant prepare your taxes without looking at
your receipts? no. can webmail provider provide you email
service without asking your emails? sure he can
dwighttk - 21 hours ago
how about:my accountant preparing my tax return for free in
exchange for... inviting ...a sleazy salesman [to] sneak a
peek at them and find new ways to sell me stuff.
dgacmu - 21 hours ago
That's not very accurate. It's more like:Your accountant
prepares your tax return for free. They also have a lot of
boxes of flyers provided to them by people who want to sell
things. After preparing your tax return, they use their
knowledge of your return to choose which flyer to put into
the envelope. They then send that envelope back to you,
and when you open it to read your tax return, there's a
flyer for something else paperclipped to the front with a
note saying "Thought you might find this interesting."(In
particular, the accountant is only one who sees the
information in your tax return.)
isomorphic - 21 hours ago
> offering you goods and services you may be interested inThe
thing is: never, not even once, has Google offered me an ad
with goods and services I was interested in.
jpeg_hero - 21 hours ago
ok, maybe Gmail ads have been irrelevant to you. but
surely you've done a google search and been presented with
interesting goods and services?!?!
takeda - 20 hours ago
The only times I clicked on those was:1. the site was
actually what I typed in the address but forgot to add
.com etc2. by accident
bostik - 20 hours ago
Anecdata: in the past 5 years or so the number of
relevant or interesting search ads Google has shown me
can be counted with one hand.- If I'm searching for
technical documentation, I couldn't care less about all
the random consultancies or shitty-SaaS-of-the-day trash
that populate the ad slot(s).- If I'm looking for
technical details on a piece of malware or vulnerability
research, the last thing I want to see on the page is a
goddamn AV junkware full-frontal.- If I'm searching for
details on some car models ... why the fk is google
shoving insurance ads on my screen real estate?And so on.
As far as I'm concerned, online advertising is a
stripmined toxic dump. Only the shittiest swindlers and
shadiest extortion artists remain.
pbhjpbhj - 15 hours ago
>- If I'm searching for details on some car models ...
why the fk is google shoving insurance ads on my screen
real estate? //Brand marketing. It may not work on you,
but it works in general.Personally I consider myself
pretty imune to marketing but when you think "who else
should I check to switch my car insurance to" then that
brand is going to pop up if it's been fed to your brain
enough. Indeed when you're looking at a list of similar
offers the one that's associated with a name you already
know will seem somehow more trustsworthy, it's an
insidious finagling of a brand in to your brain drip by
drip. Why do they do it? It works.
CamperBob2 - 15 hours ago
It's more like your accountant preparing your tax return for
free in exchange for aggregating data about your receipts and
offering you goods and services you may be interested in.Hmm.
I could actually see that working, as a spinoff of concierge
services offered by companies like American Express.
EGreg - 21 hours ago
I don't understand why seeing an ad is so bad. So a sleazy
salesman is more annoying because they are in your way. But if
you're going to see ads anyway, I'd rather they be relevant!!
Can soemone explain why given that there will be ads either way
they actually prefer irrelevant ads?
watwut - 19 hours ago
Relevant ad is euphemism for "ad that makes you buy stuff you
would happily not own otherwise". Since ads in general work
(they make people buy more or different stuff) and you can
not objectively evaluate whether you was influenced by ads,
it is rational to avoid them.Practically, once add service
knows I am women, it insist on showing me ads for
menstruation cups everywhere I browse. I also find
juxtaposition of baby accessories and relaxation bullshit on
metal, programming or games site mood killing. When they know
less about me, I actually get less weird more neutral less
crappy ads.
rubber_duck - 18 hours ago
>Relevant ad is euphemism for "ad that makes you buy stuff
you would happily not own otherwise". Since ads in general
work (they make people buy more or different stuff) and you
can not objectively evaluate whether you was influenced by
ads, it is rational to avoid them.Umm - you should avoid
getting information because it might influence you to buy
things ? There's nothing wrong with what you said, in an
ideal world ads would be just that - informing the customer
about your product - and influencing their decisions with
information. The psychological marketing tricks to make a
thing more attractive is also a value add.Problem is it's
easy to be misleading, create disinformation and it can be
very profitable - that's what leads to shitty borderline
fraudulent ads we have.
jodrellblank - 9 hours ago
Umm - you should avoid getting information because it
might influence you to buy things?UMMMMMMmmmmm -
yes?Obviously?If you wouldn't let a salesperson barge
into your house, interrupt your reading to try and
convince you to get discount eye surgery, why would you
let that happen in visual form?in an ideal world ads
would be just that - informing the customer about your
productThis is not anything like an 'ideal' world. One
human has such limited attention, that you could spend
every second of your lifetime attending to a different
product and do nothing else, and you still wouldn't cover
them all. And companies still wouldn't be happy with this
ridiculous limit case, they'd still want a greater share
of your attention and wallet. You, us, individually, mean
nothing except a source of coins.If we want to mean
anything to ourselves, defence against the dark arts is
necessary.The psychological marketing tricks to make a
thing more attractive is also a value add.The
psychological marketing tricks to make a thing more
attractive is abusive and parasitic. Ideal brains would
search for what they need, and buy the most fitting
thing. Human brains which can be manipulated are a
weakness we all share - and we should all be kind enough
not to abuse this fact of each other any more than we
have to.
rubber_duck - 1 hours ago
>Ideal brains would search for what they need, and buy
the most fitting thing.That's not really how things work
- there are certain things you need to accomplish other
things where your reasoning partially applies but even
then it's debatable. But then there are things you do for
pleasure - and how you value those things can be
completely separate from their physical properties.For
example there was a study[1] where they gave people 5
vine samples, a cheap wine with 5$ price tag, same wine
with a 45$ price tag, 90$ vine and the same 90$ vine with
a 10$ label, and a correctly labeled 35$ vine. They found
that reported enjoyment and measured fMRI activity went
up with price even for same vine. Plenty of similar
studies that show similar effects for branding, etc. So
these things actually create value even if they don't
physically change the product - you end up enjoying it
more and it's purpose is your enjoyment.I mean most of
the high end stuff ends up being blowing smoke up your
ass to make you feel good about paying 2-10x markup, even
when the quality is superior they bundle the bullshit and
inflate the price extra because they know you'll pay.[1]
http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2008/pr-wine-011608.html
watwut - 10 hours ago
Ads are not information. They are not factual.
Psychological marketing does add at value to me, just
like being manipulated in person does not add value to
me.
rubber_duck - 1 hours ago
Like I responded below, psychological marketing effects
like branding, exclusivity, etc. have been shown to
increase peoples enjoyment of products in multiple
studies.Being manipulated can also add measurable value
to you. For example if a doctor gave you a sugar pill for
some condition and the placebo effect helped you get
better - would you say that it added no value just
because the sugar pill physically did nothing ?
bostik - 20 hours ago
> I'd rather they be relevantCorollary: if you can't show a
relevant ad, HOW ABOUT NOT SHOWING AN IRRELEVANT AT ALL?
EGreg - 19 hours ago
Actually, it is not a corollary.
literallycancer - 18 hours ago
Would you prefer the party trying to trick you into buying
crap you don't need to have more or less information about
you?
sean2 - 19 hours ago
Here's why I prefer irrelevant ads:1. Targeted ads catch my
attention better. Frequently I don't even notice or remember
irrelevant adds.2. Targeted ads are almost always, SEOed (if
you will) to me; that is, they seem relevant, they offer the
solution needed to fix the precise problem I'm discussing in
the email chain, I click, I read, I would buy, but I realize
that the product offered is nothing like what I've been
reading about on the landing page.3. Targeted adds are much
more effective at convincing me to spend money on stuff or
services that I could have lived without.Sure, I should
toughen up mentally against ads, but until I do, I protect
myself from ads that will manipulate me and one way to do
that is to prefer irrelevant ads when I need to see them.
sowbug - 15 hours ago
I'm curious how you make a living and whether the business
you're in relies on advertising to sustain itself. Perhaps
I'm reading too much into your post, but I detect a value
judgment that businesses trying to be businesses (i.e.,
selling you stuff) is a bad thing.
amelius - 13 hours ago
It's a bad thing if the business with the biggest
advertisement budget wins, rather than the business with
the best (or most fitting) product.
fserb - 18 hours ago
if you accountant was a computer.We have to stop this madness
of thinking that "John READS my diary" means the same thing as
"The function fread() READS nitems objects". Those don't mean
the same thing except in a metaphorical sense. It's insane.
discordance - 11 hours ago
Madness? - remember not long ago when unroll.me was selling
your email data to Uber?
fserb - 28 minutes ago
yeah, that's a horrible thing. But again, not the same
thing as me reading your journal. I'm just claiming that
you shouldn't mix those two things.
CaptSpify - 17 hours ago
why does it matter? Google has access to read my email, and
if they want (or are pushed to), they can single me out and
then go and read them. Sure, 9/10 times it's a bot reading my
emails, but there's nothing stopping them from doing it.
fserb - 16 hours ago
it matters exactly because of what you are saying.You do
have protections against someone reading your email at
Google. Both from a expectation of privacy, but also from a
company perspective. You also do have some non-expectation
of privacy (if, for example, the US government wants to
read your google email, they can ask for it and they
eventually will).The day someone with a brain and an
opinion on Kim Kardashian at Google reads your email, there
is a HUGE difference from when Google is "reading" your
email for ads/spam/spelling/whatever.You don't want to blur
that line being wishywashy with language. You want to know
that difference. The fact that it could happen is why you
need that clear separation between "machine reading" and "a
person reading".
CaptSpify - 14 hours ago
> You do have protections against someone reading your
email at Google.And those protections are bullshit.I have
no guarantee that they are not reading my email. If a bot
has access, a person has access, and people abuse their
access all the time.In fact, there have been cases of
googlers reading peoples email. And I'm not blurring any
line, I'm stating: Gmail can, has been, and will be
abused. To pretend that is not the case is, frankly,
naive.
jsmthrowaway - 13 hours ago
I know this is cold comfort, but every single production
data access is audited at Google, and that's after one
signs more NDAs than you can shake a stick at to even get
logs access in the first place. Each incident, with David
Barksdale being the worst, has made them lock down logs,
PII, and production access at a level unprecedented of
any I've seen (including HIPAA shops).You're correct that
the possibility exists, but any Googler inhales heavily
and makes sure their paperwork is in order before
accessing prod. The warnings that are displayed are not
unlike those when you're removing a nuclear core on a
starship. It's scary. They want it that way. You need a
damned good reason to even look at subject lines in the
inbox (like fixing a bug involving subject line rendering
that only appears with a user's specific subject line,
for instance), and clicking a message is almost certainly
a walk. Like, within the day.They do take this seriously.
I wouldn't call it bullshit. The protections I observed
were in place before Snowden, so I imagine it's even more
rigorous now.
CaptSpify - 12 hours ago
I'm sure they have a lot of checks, but that doesn't
really matter if:A) they can be bypassed, as they have
been in the pastB) they can be compelled to hand that
data elsewhereSo I'm calling bullshit. Until it's
impossible for them to look at my data, then they aren't
taking it seriously.
jsmthrowaway - 12 hours ago
You're calling bullshit on what, exactly? I'm providing
you perspective on the very thing you're hypothesizing
about from firsthand experience.What is your technical
solution for operating Gmail without any Googler having
the ability to access some aspect of your data? It's
email on the Web. Handling that e2e is pretty much
intractable, and cleartext or nearly-cleartext with
online keys has to exist somewhere even without the
Googley things they do to data. I might posit that
building a functional service with that requirement would
be impossible for the Gmail case and many others (but I'm
ready to be proven wrong).
CaptSpify - 9 hours ago
>> They do take this seriously. I wouldn't call it
bullshit. > You're calling bullshit on what,
exactly?really? your firsthand experience is nice, but
your ignoring that those methods don't work.> What is
your technical solution for operating Gmail without any
Googler having the ability to access some aspect of your
data?They can use any of the current zero-knowledge
encryption methods. This isn't anything new and has been
around for a long time. There's no need for Google to
have those keys.Encryption isn't a new problem for email,
it's already a thing.
fserb - 12 hours ago
what's the use case you are worried about? Tell me a
story. Who is accessing your date, for which purpose,
when, how much, etc... and explain how Gmail is a bad
solution because Google "can read it".Yes, Google does
not offer you protection against the Government. That is
a true statement. But that doesn't mean that it's all or
none. There are so many privacy rights before "a warrant
request". And news flash, unless you are extremely good
at securing your own mail server, even then you are not
protected against a warrant.Those checks are not
bullshit. Every single security system "can be bypassed".
CaptSpify - 9 hours ago
The use case is pretty obvious by now: people trying to
manipulate me (ads), overreaching government intrusion,
and invasions of privacy.I never said that Google just
sends everything over to them, but they can come and
access my data without me ever knowing, and that's a
problem. Just because there are (imo broken) checks in
place does nothing to negate that fact.Those checks are
provably bullshit by the previous breaches. If they
weren't bullshit, there would never have been breaches.
fserb - 1 hours ago
as I said, government intrusion can't be defended as is.
Name one web technology that is government intrusion
proof. Fuck that. Name on technology that is so. Air
gapping isn't. Granted, air gapping allows you to at
least know about it. But that's that."invasions of
privacy" is not a use case. Give me details. By whom?
Your partner? Your coworker? 4chan? Your mayor? Russia?
What information are they getting from you? Why? It's
very likely that whatever use case you come up with, you
are better defended with 2auth gmail than with whatever
other solution.That's a problem with the web. In 15
years, and not counting legal government requests, there
were what? 3 cases of email data breaches that were
caught? 5? That's your "provably bullshit"? What do you
use on your life that has a lower failure rate than this?
CaptSpify - 1 hours ago
> as I said, government intrusion can't be defended as
is.yes it can. zero-knowledge encryption is already a
thing.> Name one web technology that is government
intrusion proof.Apparently the iPhone is. pgp encryption
is another one. I'd suggest brushing up on basic security
before saying things like that.> "invasions of privacy"
is not a use case.Why not?> By whom?By anyone that I
don't authorize. Sure, that could be my partner,
coworker, any government authority, etc.> What
information are they getting from you?Are you serious? If
you don't even understand that threat model, then again,
I'd suggest looking in basic security models.> you are
better defended with 2auth gmail2auth gmail is orthogonal
to the issue. That's an security method. Currently Google
does that but still can grant access to anyone they want.
That's a problem that 2auth doesn't address.> not
counting legal government requestsWhy not? Why remove a
legitimate security issue from the discussion?> 3 cases
of email data breaches that were caughtI have no idea how
many have been caught, once again, that's orthogonal to
the issue. How many examples doesn't matter. It's that
they do have access and can do it whenever they want.>
What do you use on your life that has a lower failure
rate than this?That's a completely illogical argument.
"We shouldn't ensure privacy/security because other
things in life fail more often" makes no sense.
fserb - 31 minutes ago
> Apparently the iPhone isIf you are referring to the San
Bernardino phone thingy, the FBI withdrew the request
exactly because they did access the phone by themselves.
It just cost more money.> pgp encryption is another
onelol. Isn't there tons of reports claiming that PGP
leaks too much metadata? And that the NSA is collecting
those? And that there's no reasonable way to use PGP
without leaking those (like hidden-sender whatever).> >
"invasions of privacy" is not a use case. > Why
not?Because I want specifics. Just saying someone
"invaded your privacy" doesn't tell me anything. Tell me
a full story: entity X did Y to know Z from W. And show
me how using gmail made W more unsafe on that case. And
what I'm trying to tell you, is that there are two
cases:- legal government related. In which case Google
can't (and won't) protect you. It's a fair claim. If you
are doing something that the US government wants to know
about, don't use gmail. But most things won't protect you
from that anyway. Ask Dread Pirate Roberts about it. :)-
non-government related. In which case you are better
protected with gmail than most things you can reasonably
do. Ask Hillary Clinton. :)> That's a completely
illogical argument. "We shouldn't ensure privacy/security
because other things in life fail more often" makes no
sense.Where did I say we shouldn't ensure
privacy/security? What I'm refuting is your claim that
"it's bullshit because it failed once". Gmail does a
better job than most other things. Most things in your
life fail more often than that. And most things don't
evolve security/privacy wise as well as gmail does.
calibration263 - 17 hours ago
It's not about who reads it, it's about who has access. If a
system has access to read my email as plain text, it means
anyone who owns or can get access to that system can read my
email.Some one wrote fread, it could've been john, and john
absolutely could be reading your email. Look at the what
happened with ubers god mode.That said the value of gmail for
me exceeds the risk of people I care about reading my email
getting access or having access. However my(and probably
your) subjective view on the value of your emails is
absolutely subjective.
fserb - 16 hours ago
Of course access is the important thing.But then again, in
the context of the story, it doesn't change anything.
Google still has access to your email. That it is not
"reading" for the purpose of ads is just a minor thing that
doesn't impact your privacy/security in any way (in the
terms that you are describing).
euyyn - 16 hours ago
Probably easier to hack any other mail provider than hack
into Google and own it so badly as to being able to read
emails in plaintext.
[deleted]
omarforgotpwd - 21 hours ago
The distinction to me is: Are they building and saving some data
structure that they've created based on my emails which is
designed to target ads towards me, but could be used by some
nefarious actor to learn a lot about my life?The spam filter
(hopefully) probably doesn't store that much about me, but an ad
targeting bot could be a lot more problematic.
ksk - 21 hours ago
Does the automated nature of the permanent data collection change
anything? How about an automated drone with a camera mounted on
it that follows you everywhere and records every action,
indefinitely, purely automated ofcource, so that an advertising
company can helpfully remind you about the awesome great $6 lunch
menu when you walk past McBurger at lunchtime, or about picking
up some hemorrhoids cream from MediCo because a machine learning
algorithm saw you scratch your butt and deduced something.
Ajedi32 - 21 hours ago
Depends. Is that drone providing me with some other useful
service, or is it following me around entirely without my
knowledge or consent?Gmail provides me with a free email
service. They already have the full text of all my emails. If
they want to use that data to help decide what ads to serve me,
I have no problem with that so long as that data isn't shared
with anyone else without my consent.
sqeaky - 21 hours ago
> data isn't shared with anyone else without my consentDo you
have any way of verifying this? I am not accusing google of
anything, I just find this to be an interesting level of
trust to have with a free online service.
obmelvin - 18 hours ago
Google's entire business relies on maintaining this user
trust. They have far more to lose than to gain by betraying
user trust.
sqeaky - 16 hours ago
I am curious about the downvotes. Do we really downvote
people here for questioning trusting Google?I didn't even
say not to trust google, I just questioned the level of
trust.
CaptSpify - 9 hours ago
Meh, people do that here, not sure why. But to answer
your question: no, there's not.Google has already
secretly given people's info away. They've admitted to
getting and complying with NSL's already.
Ajedi32 - 19 hours ago
Google is a large, generally reputable company which has
very little to gain and everything to lose by sharing my
personal information with others in violation of their own
privacy policy.In the absence of any evidence that they
_are_ sharing my private information with others, I see no
reason not to trust them in this regard.
pdkl95 - 10 hours ago
> everything to loseReally? Good luck suing them if they
decide to sell your data. They certainly won't lose much
revenue from fleeing customers if they think up a
creative new way to monetize your data with "select
business partners"; Google (and Facebook et al) spent the
last decade entrenching themselves infrastructure for far
too many people. They have far too much power and inertia
to lose much in the short or medium term.> trust
themPrivacy policies change. Even if Google has good
intentions about protecting your data today, you're
gambling that those intentions will not change in the
future. You don't know who will be hired/fired at Google
in the future, nor do you know how the current (or any)
management will react should the company have a
particularly unfortunate run of bad finances or other
troubles. Never-mind that humans often act irrationally
for stupid reasons so any prediction about future
behavior has to have a huge error bar.However, that isn't
the big problem with trusting Google to not share your
pattern-of-life[1] with a 3rd party: you're assuming it
will be Google's choice, or that they will even have any
de facto influence over the long-term fate of your
personal information. Your trust doesn't make Google
infallible; the best security teams can only make hacks
less likely. Warrants, legislation, and quasi-legal-but-
hard-to-ignore orders from governments happen. Prism (and
other mass surveillance programs) still exist.
Concentrating valuable data at one location makes it more
valuable, so the scope of potential threats to your data
increases as more data is collected.The world is not as
just[2]. Trusting that your data will magically stay safe
at Google forever - or even just the near future - is
only possible if you first pretend that Googles security
is and always will be perfect, that the programs
Snowden/Drake/Binney/etc warned us about never existed,
that no current or future Google employee will ever
become disgruntled (or crazy), and probably many more
potential threats that haven't been invented yet.[1] or
mundane data like your email[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
CaptSpify - 9 hours ago
Even though they've given some people's info away already
to at least the US government?That just seems silly
sqeaky - 19 hours ago
I use GMail for similar reasons, they are reputable, but
I have no expectation they won't share my data once it
makes financial sense.
ksk - 20 hours ago
But your profile is not just linked with Gmail. Its across
Google, including any future products. Its a kind of cross-
product tying using customer data (which gives them an easy
leg-up on new ad-subsidized products) that I would assume
attracts anti-trust scrutiny.I think its fair for you to
accept the terms, if you know what you're getting in return.
The problem here is that you will never know exactly what
information is stored about you, and how personal it is, and
you have zero control over it. Also simply by sending YOU an
email, I'm also entangled in the data collection scheme.
Ajedi32 - 19 hours ago
> The problem here is that you will never know exactly what
information is stored about you, and how personal it is,
and you have zero control over it.On the contrary. I know
what emails are stored in my inbox just as well as Google
does. I can also search through that information and delete
it if I so choose, so I do have control over it.
CaptSpify - 16 hours ago
You can remove your access to that data. Theres no
indication that said data is actually deleted.They also
have a lot more information about you than just your
email, especially if you use their search.
morganvachon - 18 hours ago
The problem is that it's not just your email. If you send an
email to a Gmail user, Google is now building a profile on you
(or was until this move) as well as your recipient. Did you give
explicit consent to Google? Did you sign a EULA or SLA with them
allowing this? No, they just did it anyway. Even someone who
makes a point to keep themselves off of Google's radar will end
up indexed and sold to the highest bidder if they send even one
innocent email to a Gmail user.
meanderer - 17 hours ago
Building profiles of senders can be necessary, e.g., for
detecting spammer accounts.Also, email is transmitted in plain
text. Sending an email is more like shouting to your friends in
the street, rather than putting a letter into an envelope
mailed to the recipient. Thus, I don't think an explicit
consent is needed.That said, I understand that fair use of such
information is a concern.
netheril96 - 15 hours ago
> Also, email is transmitted in plain text. Sending an email
is more like shouting to your friends in the street, rather
than putting a letter into an envelope mailed to the
recipient. Thus, I don't think an explicit consent is
needed.These days Gmail will transfer your email protected by
TLS if possible. Not shouting at all.
morganvachon - 13 hours ago
Exactly. Google seems to be of two minds about privacy.
They want to show that they protect your information from
the rest of the world, but they expect 100% knowledge of
your information in return, so they can sell it to their
advertisers. I get that that's their business model, which
is why I dropped them completely in favor of paid services
that don't sell my information.
roywiggins - 22 hours ago
The spam filter is for my benefit, but scanning for ad keywords
is designed to benefit someone else, not me.
[deleted]
blowski - 22 hours ago
To play Devil's advocate, the ads benefit you because they make
Gmail free.
simias - 21 hours ago
What about people not using gmail but sending email to a
gmail users? Those don't gain anything here.I actually host
my own email but every time I send a message to somebody
using one of these webmails it gets indexed and monetized.But
I would argue that it's a technical problem first and
foremost, email security is mostly a joke. If I need to send
sensitive things through emails I can always use PGP to
actually protect it, instead of relying on the goodwill of
the email provider not to peek into the message. If people
really valued their privacy they'd be doing something
similar.
StreamBright - 22 hours ago
I would rather pay and do not share anything with Google (or
for that matter all of Google's partners who can purchase our
data)
ams6110 - 22 hours ago
There are many options to pay for email, fastmail just for
one. Do you use one of them?
StreamBright - 21 hours ago
And how exactly will I escape Google's data collection
when Fastmail uses GA for analytics?....script
type="text/javascript" src="/static/scripts/ga.js....
jkaunisv1 - 20 hours ago
Run a broad-spectrum blocker like uBlock Origin? Access
your fastmail from an interface other than their web
interface?
StreamBright - 20 hours ago
Ok so there is more involved than just use Fastmail, as
it was suggested. Thanks for confirming.
dabernathy89 - 19 hours ago
> many options to pay for email, fastmail just for one
emodendroket - 22 hours ago
Google isn't just an e-mail service, really.
thomasfoster96 - 21 hours ago
But? you don?t really have to use Gmail to use most of
Google?s other products, just as you don?t really have to
use (actively) Google+ to use other Google products
either.
StreamBright - 21 hours ago
Unfortunately no. You are going to be tracked whereever
you go and it has GA. The reason why Google can stop
reading your emails is because they have a global network
now that can track you better.
emodendroket - 21 hours ago
But imagine you use an Android phone, for instance.
There's a whole bunch of integrated stuff that works well
together that wouldn't if you had a Google account and
then kept your e-mail somewhere else. It's not really a
1:1 comparison.
[deleted]
euyyn - 16 hours ago
> all of Google's partners who can purchase our dataI'm
pretty sure that's the empty set.
EGreg - 21 hours ago
You can, it's called Google Apps for Business.
mojowo11 - 18 hours ago
Not to be pedantic, but it's called "G Suite" nowadays.
oh_sigh - 22 hours ago
Ads benefit both you and the other group that they connect you.
You finding out about, say, a product you are interested
benefits you.
throwaway2048 - 22 hours ago
Out of curiosity do you work in advertising tech or
marketing?They are about the only people I've ever seen
express this view seriously.
oh_sigh - 22 hours ago
Nope - I am a developer working on a consumer oriented
application with no advertisements.I'm not trying to say
that all ads give you that benefit - most are just a waste
of screen space, compute and bandwidth.
majewsky - 19 hours ago
Even if I agreed that some ads have benefit, the cost-
benefit analysis (with costs including screen space,
compute, bandwidth and the malware threat) still looks
grim enough to justify adblocking IMO.
soperj - 22 hours ago
What if you're buddhist?
sqeaky - 21 hours ago
There are many flavors of Buddhism, which one matters here
for the point you are making?EDIT - I am not sure why I am
being downvote, I legitimately don't get his point and
figured I would for more info rather than just calling him
out as a troll or something. Is there something obvious I
should know?
CaptSpify - 16 hours ago
Disclaimer: I know nothing of Buddhism, I haven't even
read the Wikipedia pageI believe some Buddhism teaches
something along the lines of: personal possessions are
bad, and freedom is found in not owning anything.I think
OP is saying: advertising goes directly against that line
of thinking. It is actually tempting a Buddhist to buy
more stuff, thus going against their religion.
jodrellblank - 8 hours ago
"Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God
while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to
peel the potatoes while being informed about ten local
places to purchase God with next-day delivery."
CaptSpify - 22 hours ago
In theory, yesIn actuality: they are a waste of my time and
mental space
oh_sigh - 21 hours ago
I'll agree that most ads are junk and not relevant to a
users life, but that doesn't mean all ads are.Having said
that, I've never clicked on an ad in Gmail since 2004 or
so.
Ajedi32 - 21 hours ago
That's true in the sense that having no ads at all would be
better; but if you're going to be seeing ads either way,
why wouldn't you want them to be ads for things relevant to
your interests?
CaptSpify - 20 hours ago
Why would I be seeing ads either way? I generally don't
see them at all.
Ajedi32 - 19 hours ago
Whether you block ads or not is kinda beside the point.
It's a little unreasonable to expect Google or anyone
else to stop personalizing the ads they're trying to
serve you just based on the fact that you're blocking
them.
jodrellblank - 8 hours ago
http://www.talkingnewmedia.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/05/ou...http://moneyinc.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/06/nypostoutbrai...Benefitting.
You.https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B2044DNCEAAHmu-.pngThe next
time you want to buy, say, 9 celebs in open
relationships.http://www.cpawealthacademy.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/08/R...This is what ads are. This is
what we adblock. This is clickbait, lies, manipulation,
visually distracting, space wasting, untrustworthy, barrel
scraping garbage."Ads inform you about products" in the same
way slime mould informs you that your house is too damp. The
best individual course of action is not to buy what the mould
is selling.
roywiggins - 22 hours ago
That's just a rare side-effect, not the reason why the
scanning happens, or why the ads are shown.
oh_sigh - 22 hours ago
The ads are shown exactly for that reason. If the only ads
shown were for products or services or information which
the consumer was not interested in, then no one would pay
for advertisements in the first place.
coldpie - 21 hours ago
Apparently spreading malware is pretty high value,
actually.
gpm - 21 hours ago
In a perfect world, yes. In the real world ads are about
manipulating through every psychological trick in the book to
buy shit you don't need. To manipulate you into thinking
brand A is better than brand B (both of which you were
already aware of). Etc.
late2part - 16 hours ago
By your logic, the NSA isn't recording your calls or emails, just
filing them away for classification?
bradjohnson - 21 hours ago
One requires google to build a profile and have the knowledge in
order to serve you their advertisements and the other can be done
almost entirely client side. The spam filter doesn't need to
phone home for anything other than updating the list.
real-hacker - 5 hours ago
A frightening theory: it doesn't need to read your email anymore.
It has read 10 years worth of your mail, and trained such an
accurate model, that any more training data don't make much of a
difference.
cookiecaper - 22 hours ago
The spam filter is [assumed to be] transient/generalized. While a
user may set special tuning parameters to classify what they
consider "junk", this probably reveals more about the inadequacy
of the spam filter than it does about the user.On the other hand,
a program which analyzes mail to ascertain the tastes, interests,
and personal plans of the participants is mining much more
sensitive data, and it's compiling/storing it off-site long-term,
and it's very specific to the individuals involved.All of us
who've used Gmail know how creepy it can get. Send a couple of
mails about marriage and suddenly you start seeing targeted ads
about engagement rings or other marriage-related things. Google
stores this forever and they'll say "Ah, we know this guy was
talking about marriage 10 years ago; traditionally, marriages
fail after 5 years, we've detected a tense tone in his mails to
his wife, BEEP BOP BOOP, DIVORCE LAWYER AD IS RELEVANT".This
inference is not only dubious (ethically and technically), but
anyone observing your browsing while you're logged in will see
these ads and may assume that you're seeing those ads because
you've been searching for information on divorce, not because
Google's inference is overzealous, although it may very well be.
Search and replace with anything else: new credit
cards/bankruptcy lawyers, research on a medical condition/ads for
related medicines, etc.; the potential for creepy inference is
endless, not to mention the concrete surveillance value provided
to literal spies (via PRISM), nor the risk of compromise/abuse
outside of the ad space. They don't have to get and process your
entire mail archive; they just have to draw their inferences from
Google's own inferences in your compiled taste/interest
profile.That's much more serious than a throwaway analysis of
whether a mail contains spammy properties or not.
luhn - 21 hours ago
> Google stores this forever and they'll say "Ah, we know this
guy was talking about marriage 10 years ago; traditionally,
marriages fail after 5 years, we've detected a tense tone in
his mails to his wife, BEEP BOP BOOP, DIVORCE LAWYER AD IS
RELEVANT".Have you actually seen anything like this? In my
experience the ad targeting seems like extremely shallow
keyword analysis.
ksk - 20 hours ago
This gets to the heart of how divisions inside a company
justify their budget and where human self-preservation kicks
in. For e.g. A lawyer inside the company HAS to be on the
lookout for supposed infringements of IP or situations where
their "expertise" is required.The idea is that once you have
any apparatus in place, and funds allocated to the
maintenance/operation there of, you will find that people
come up with creative ways to use that apparatus to either
cement their position in the company or to improve career
prospects. This applies to lots of domains, the obvious one
being the government. Once you have a drone program, you'll
find that someone somewhere WILL find a way to justify its
usefulness.My main problem with data collection is the
permanent nature of it, where someone somewhere at some point
in time, possibly when the computational costs become
feasible, will come up with a seemingly innocuous use of the
data that will spiral out of control. Also, is Google hack-
proof? Judging by the lawsuits around the self-driving
division, apparently its trivial to steal data if you're on
the inside.
majewsky - 19 hours ago
Of course its trivial to steal data if you're on the
inside. Snowden could copy classified docs onto a USB stick
and smuggle them out of a fucking NSA office. If I were to
plug in a USB drive at work, no one would bat an eye.
They'd probably think it's for Time Machine.
briandear - 17 hours ago
It really depends on where you work. I know of a little
company in the Cupertino area where such data theft would
be nearly impossible and yet other companies, engineers
have full access to production databases.
sqeaky - 17 hours ago
I cannot recall where, but I remember reading about this.
Based on associated products women buy occasionally they will
sometimes get coupons for things like diapers and baby
formula while they are pregnant before they know. My guess is
that anytime a woman changes her shopping habits the
marketers send some stuff her way because even a miss ratio
of 90% could still be profitable.It isn't always accurate, I
know a girl that is very not pregnant but gets these things
anyway. She babysits occasionally and I suspect that combined
with her Baker's card and Walgreen's card give the mass
marketing gurus all the information they need to know that
she sometimes cares for kids.
base698 - 17 hours ago
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhi
l...They were doing this in early 2000s, can't imagine how
sophisticated the same type of system is now.
cookiecaper - 20 hours ago
That's a hypothetical example, and it would of course be
impossible to know what specific piece of data led Google to
present a specific ad, and whether they're involving an
analysis of how historical interests relate to current
interests. Whether Google actively engages in such analysis
now or not, they easily could.I personally use AdBlock so I
don't see Google ads very often, but I have been creeped out
by ads in the past, and I have had Google infer interests in
changes to relationship status based on mail content (e.g.,
offering engagement rings).I believe they have manual filters
to try to stop inferences that are too offensive from being
made (e.g. suggesting a divorce), but those, of course, can
never be perfect, and it doesn't mean they aren't making the
inference or maintaining the data necessary to do so; it just
means that they are blocking it from showing up.I'm not
really saying this is either good or bad. The question was
why people care less about reading emails to filter for spam
than they care about people reading emails to develop a
consumer's ad profile. These are some reasons why.
DanBC - 21 hours ago
And yet everyone's up in arms if GCHQ / NSA does it.
CamperBob2 - 15 hours ago
Corporations didn't murder a hundred million of their own
customers in the last century alone. It takes a government to
do that. Consequently, governments have to be held to higher
standards, not lower ones.
dragonwriter - 15 hours ago
> Corporations didn't murder a hundred million of their own
customers in the last century alone.Yes, they did. Probably
just tobacco companies alone.> It takes a government to do
that.Since corporations are creatures of government, that's
true by definition of everything corporations do.
CamperBob2 - 14 hours ago
Yes, they did. Probably just tobacco companies alone.A
response as silly as it was predictable. Show me a Gulag
Archipelago written about the tobacco industry and we'll
have some grounds for further discussion.Since corporations
are creatures of government, that's true by definition of
everything corporations do.Ditto.
dragonwriter - 14 hours ago
> Show me a Gulag Archipelago written about the tobacco
industry and we'll have some grounds for further
discussion.So if no one writes world class literature
about your crimes, they didn't happen?
thomasahle - 20 hours ago
NSA doing it is a lot worse. There is no transparency on what
they do. I get no benefits in return for sharing my data. They
have license to do all kinds of nasty things to me, that Google
would have to go through a court for. From blocking my flights
to making me disappear at night.
briandear - 17 hours ago
No benefits? That?s bit like saying that security screenings
at airports offer no benefit to anyone. While security
screenings are inefficient and could be improved, that
doesn?t mean they offer zero benefit.Also what?s the
likelihood of the NSA blocking your flight or making you
disappear in the night? You probably should fear crossing the
street more in terms of statistical likelihood of harm.I get
the privacy/freedom arguments however the hyperbole around
this stuff is getting ridiculous as the fears are badly
supported by actual data and statistical significance.More
people drowned in swimming pools last year than were
?disappeared? by the NSA but there seems little hysteria
around swimming pools. I pretty sure most of us don?t know a
single person on a no-fly list.Some high levels of paranoia
around here it seems.
eh78ssxv2f - 17 hours ago
I think "consent" is important here. GMail does it with the
consent of the user.
austincheney - 21 hours ago
In the US a service provider is allowed to violate all manners of
privacy for the express limitation of ensuring maintenance and
system health. Spam blocking would qualify as maintenance, but
advertising would not. I suspect Google violates all manners of
privacy in an automated way for all manners of reasons and
qualifies such in their terms and conditions.
robbart90 - 22 hours ago
"The decision didn?t come from Google?s ad team, but from its cloud
unit, which is angling to sign up more corporate
customers."Interesting timing with the story earlier this week
about Wal-Mart telling vendors to stop using AWS
geekme - 8 hours ago
I will never use a enterprise google product unless they have
customer support. The customer support team should have humans and
not robots.
Xorlev - 7 hours ago
Enterprise customers have support. It's not as feasible in the
consumer space, the volume would be overwhelming.
flavor8 - 21 hours ago
Fine. Can they please make Google Apps users first class users in
the google ecosystem?
jikeo - 21 hours ago
I know I shouldn't be surprised, but it seems weird that the
reporter nor any of the 140+ comments so far seemingly don't
mention the recently published proposal for a new ePrivacy
directive in the EU that will make it a lot harder for Google to
scan e-mails in the first place.https://www.reuters.com/article/us-
eu-privacy-idUSKBN14U1FL
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/10/whatsapp-...
http://www.kemplittle.com/site/articles/kl_bytes/the-draft-e...
chicob - 20 hours ago
That directive might be related to what's happening.But let's not
be naive: if Google will stop reading our emails in order to send
us personalized ads, that's because it doesn't really need to.
People share just enough outside their email environment for
Google to do its thing. Another sign of which those worrying
about privacy should be aware.
hn_throwaway_99 - 17 hours ago
Exactly. Google already knows a shit ton about you, and given
how data driven they are, I guarantee they came to the
conclusion that they would still be able to show highly
targeted ads with little or no loss in revenue or click-
through-rates rates. Heck, dollars to donuts they've already
A/B tested the shit out of it to reach this conclusion.
[deleted]
x0x0 - 16 hours ago
Or they're willing to take a loss on the ads -- which frankly
don't make much money -- to go after the far more lucrative
corporate emailing/calendaring market. The pricing is
$5/$10/$higher per user-month, so walking away from an ads
business that may possibly (but I doubt it) be earning
hundreds of millions to avoid a cloud over your sales process
for the aforementioned multi-billion dollar business seems
like a solid trade.
omarchowdhury - 9 hours ago
Google has never shown any Sponsored Gmail ads to Google
Apps users (the corporate users you're talking about).
There is no Promotions tab, which is where these
advertisements are inserted for personal GMail users.
mistermann - 16 hours ago
If they want me to use gmail for corporate email they
better invest some effort in some UI & usability redesign.
hedora - 32 minutes ago
Or maybe they could improve IMAP availability until it is
only a few orders of magnitude worse than my local ISP
(or the previous one, or all the IT departments I've
dealt with this millennium...)
monk_e_boy - 15 hours ago
and memory consumption. I'm always amazed that gmail.com
uses so much memory if you leave it open for a few days.
sumedh - 13 hours ago
> so walking away from an ads business that may possibly
(but I doubt it) be earning hundreds of millionsThey are
making billions from ads, just look their annual report.
thanksgiving - 6 hours ago
Sorry if this is obvious but I went to focus on revenue
per user per year.In other words, how much is it worth to
fight the perception that gmail is somehow less secure
than office 365 because ads (others have pointed out
Google apps for business users don't see ads in their
work gmail).I somehow doubt that gmail ads are worth even
remotely close to $120 (12 months * $10 per month) per
user per year.In other news: How much is a user worth per
year to Google? Assuming not all users are the same, is
there a way to predict his much revenue a user can bring
for Google?
Mahn - 47 minutes ago
The competitor for Office 365 is GSuite, not Gmail.
People that were previously shown ads based on email
content are not going to start paying for Gmail.
tezzer - 16 hours ago
When you say ads don't make much money, are you talking
about from business users? 2Q 2016 $19 billion of
Alphabet's $21 billion in revenue came from ads, so that
seems like a strange statement.
mythz - 13 hours ago
The total advertising figure is irrelevant, most of their
revenue comes from Search advertising where users are
proactively in the context of seeking specific
information at the point where relevant ads are most
lucrative.The only revenue being sacrificed is being able
to deliver less contextual ads in gmail, they still know
a lot about you so they'll still be targeted ads so their
sacrificing marginal contextual targeting vs peace of
mind in a large corporate market which are hesitant to
use Google's G-Suite products because of their concerns
that their emails are being scanned.Google is smart, if
they're doing this it's because they've calculated the
increase potential in G-Suite revenue is more than the
marginal loss in less contextually specific ads in gmail.
Other factors that play a role in the decision is better
branding in that Google is no longer spying in your
private conversations to sell you targeted ads and the
mitigation of potential lawsuits.
x0x0 - 13 hours ago
The title of this page: Google Will Stop Reading
Your Emails for Gmail Ads
[deleted]
65827 - 17 hours ago
Yeah it's all inevitable and we are just powerless peons in the
face of the purely efficient and all knowing machine.That's
certainly the bullshit narrative Google wants you to believe.
kevin_thibedeau - 16 hours ago
They explain everything in the TOS you agree to when starting
a free account. It's not exactly shocking that they mine your
data in exchange.
SpikeDad - 43 minutes ago
And the 11 people out of 200 million users that read the
TOS are indeed not shocked.
hedora - 17 minutes ago
Google tracks you even if you do not have an acccount.
There is not practical way to opt out.I disagree with the
TOS but we use their services at work. What am I supposed
to do? Quit my job?Even with ads blocked and cookies
disabled, so much JavaScript is served by them, they can
infer my browsing habits anyway, and I can't count the
number of times I've had to rip 8.8.8.8 out of DNS settings
in the last year.How exactly does this constitute a choice
to share my private information with them, and what thing
that I want am I getting in exchange, exactly?
gbacon - 18 hours ago
> Ads will continue to appear inside the free version of Gmail,
as promoted messages. But instead of scanning a user?s email,
the ads will now be targeted with other personal information
Google already pulls from sources such as search and YouTube.
[deleted]
roganp - 14 hours ago
Or, maybe: the extra information gleaned from reading your
emails is just not that valuable. Not because they have this
via other means, but its just not that valuable, period -
whether it comes from reading emails or scrutinizing your
browser history. We like to imagine that if advertisers knew
enough about us, they'd be able to direct our spending, but I
think that is far from true.
piaste - 14 hours ago
I'm pretty sure scrutinizing your browser history is still
extremely valuable. But I find it quite plausible that email
in particular has lost value as marketing information.People
still use email for all kinds of business, of course. But
their day-to-day personal activities, the kind that marketers
care about ("I've taken up kayaking!", "I'm pregnant!") don't
usually show up in emails any more, they get posted on social
media.
gub09 - 14 hours ago
This makes sense. Possibly the value of increased corporate
sales of G Suite is worth more than the loss of the
information gained from reading diminishing numbers of
personal emails, as people turn more and more to social
media and phone apps for personal communication.
jodrellblank - 11 hours ago
We like to imagine that if advertisers knew enough about us,
they'd be able to direct our spending.Speak for yourself, I
don't like to imagine that at all.
tzs - 18 hours ago
Wouldn't Google be able to largely mitigate the effects of that
if they wanted to by making it so accounts that do not consent to
the scanning get smaller mailboxes or do not get spam filtering
or something like that? I'd expect that would get most of its
users to consent.
late2part - 16 hours ago
Name one free, popular, profitable, large scale service that
offers limited capacity on their offering. Very very few. You
offer unlimited and you charge for increased value or you
monetize with ads. Freemium is mostly dead.
applecrazy - 12 hours ago
Google doesn't offer unlimited data storage. 15GB to start
and more can be purchased.
late2part - 58 minutes ago
You're right. And my reponse is weak. But.... That's
really meant to discourage those "power" users (like me)
from abusing and leaving big stuff in there, I think. It's
not meant to encourage most people to pay.
lostlogin - 8 hours ago
The storage offering was way way less than that when
everyone here signed up, though it was still vastly greater
than anything anyone else offered if memory serves.
aaron_m04 - 8 hours ago
I thought freemium _was_ charging for increased value.
rhamzeh - 4 hours ago
I think the freemium model discussed here is severely
limiting your product and it's value for non-paying
customers in order to get them to pay up.One of the most
powerful advantages of Gmail vs the competition is it's
superbly powerful spam filtering and search features - I
doubt it's worth losing that powerful image in order to get
a few more users to pay up.Just like the biggest advantage
and product feature ProtonMail has is privacy and
encryption - it would be a bad product decision to remove
encryption from all free customers in order to get them to
pay up.The alternative is to offer a fully functional free*
model that focuses on your strength, and charge customers
for extra - extremely useful and important, but non product
essential - features.* Some would argue that Google's model
is not free, as you are paying for it with your data, but
that is a different discussion and outside the scope here.
andybak - 18 hours ago
They could but is it worth it?I suspect the scanning of emails
hasn't yielded the personalization once hoped. And the bad
publicity outweighs any future potential.
Steko - 16 hours ago
I just think the dollars aren't there: (1) email itself is
fading vs text and various social media and (2) 98% of the
population reads 98% of their email through the generic mail
app on their phones that doesn't display Google's ads anyway.
aleem - 18 hours ago
The industry at large and Apple in particular is coming at them
from the other direction preferring premium, furthering ad
blockers and offering better privacy defaults (iOS 11). Elon Musk
has gone so far as to allude that Google is the only AI company
that worries him[1].And so it goes. Coupled with AI and the
amount of data they are able to feed into the AI engines, I am
guessing this won't regress their ad targeting.They have also
managed to supplant it with other avenues. Google Travel, Google
Calendar and other apps have explicit permission to read your
email, Google serves email images off their own servers which
gives them a tracking beacon and behavioural data across cohorts.
All this adds a level of indirection but still gives them access
to behavioural data and user intent.[1]
http://www.androidauthority.com/elon-musk-on-ai-696198/
snowman311 - 13 hours ago
Agreed. The Google Ad Machine will never stop running. But, I
think they will diversify their revenue streams in the coming
years. Forces outside of Google's control such as governments
and competition will begin to push back on the "all you can eat
buffet" of personal data that Google has enjoyed in the past
years.Based on the numbers in the article like doubling their
"large business" user base in the past year, I think Diane
Greene will lead them to generating huge revenue in the
Enterprise sector. Also, I think freemium versions of Google
software, directed at consumers, will be increasingly popular
in the future.
davb - 22 hours ago
But will they stop using Hangouts IM content for customer
segmentation? I probably say much more relevant things in Hangouts
(from a marketing perspective) than in email.
rootsudo - 21 hours ago
How nice of Google.
tkubacki - 10 hours ago
Is free Outlook account scanning me email or for building ads
profile or for any other purpose ?
chaitime - 22 hours ago
What happens to the data that was already collected. Legally they
can still use that data right?
WisNorCan - 20 hours ago
This most likely is a pragmatic financial decision. Contextual
advertising is generating a lower CPM than data/person based
advertising.Said differently the relevance that can be extracted
from your specific email is less than the cumulative knowledge that
Google has about you from other sources.
mongmong - 16 hours ago
But couldn't the contextual email data be used to supplement the
global personal data google already has on you? I don't
understand why they would willingly forgo this data.
elsewhen - 15 hours ago
Gmail ads were no just contextual. Advertisers were able to
target people who received email from a particular domain. Can
you imagine the power of being able to target customers of a
competitor that has been developing their customer relationships
for years?This is 100% conjecture, but I wouldn't be surprised if
it was this domain targeting (which is what many advertisers were
using) that was the thing that Google's big clients were
complaining about.
aaln - 19 hours ago
Title should be: Google Will Stop Using Your Email Data for Gmail
Ads.
LeoNatan25 - 2 hours ago
Almost as if they want to do no evil. Almost.
Overtonwindow - 22 hours ago
I think I've become jaded because I just don't believe it. It's
like Google Home. A wonderful device but when I heard it may start
listening to everything I say... I just figured yeah, that should
be expected. So now I just expect Google to read, listen, and
analyze everything I do with their products.
okreallywtf - 22 hours ago
Maybe I don't understand google home because I don't have one,
but to be able to detect whatever keywords cause it to listen to
you doesn't it have to listen to everything you say?I feel like
any device that has a microphone is suspect if you want total
privacy, but listening to what you say seems like an integral
part of the device. You can only hope (and independently verify)
that they don't store everything you say.
[deleted]
ChuckMcM - 21 hours ago
It was interesting (but I suppose a random bit) that after reading
this article a new email showed up in my gmail inbox that was spam.
I wonder if this isn't the first move in a plan to create a 'pay'
gmail service for individuals.