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Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

bloomberg.com

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Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#51

Post by cookiecaper »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #16
jmull wrote: post #4

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."

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…

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?

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#52

Post by Pxtl »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #16
jmull wrote: post #4

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."

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…

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.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#53

Post by dsp1234 »

icebraining wrote: post #28
eatbitseveryday wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#54

Post by emidln »

eksemplar wrote: post #42
eridius wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

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.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#57

Post by roywiggins »

skrause wrote: post #33

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...

The spam filter is for my benefit, but scanning for ad keywords is designed to benefit someone else, not me.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#58

Post by vermontdevil »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #16
jmull wrote: post #4

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."

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…

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. "

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#59

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

dsp1234 wrote: post #53
icebraining wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Any spam filtering implies scanning right? (Unless the filtering is purely on basis of headers and other non-message-body info)

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#60

Post by ecesena »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #16
jmull wrote: post #4

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."

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…

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.

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