121–130 of 460 posts
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There are many options to pay for email, fastmail just for one. Do you use one of them?
Google isn't just an e-mail service, really.
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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.
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…
It'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.
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.
In this case it is google's code running on google's computers.
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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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
RF dead chambers are bloody expensive for a reason: you can't emulate them by pasting some paint on a wall.
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How would you search your inbox? Or filter spam?
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?
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...
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.
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Google isn't just an e-mail service, really.
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.
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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…
> The value of this model is more than the cost of them doing your tax returns It'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 p…
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.
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To play Devil's advocate, the ads benefit you because they make Gmail free.
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)