131–140 of 460 posts
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.
- no scanning emails
Are different things
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...
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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.
The thing is: never, not even once, has Google offered me an ad with goods and services I was interested in.
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.
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.
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The spam filter is for my benefit, but scanning for ad keywords is designed to benefit someone else, not me.
Ads benefit both you and the other group that they connect you. You finding out about, say, a product you are interested benefits you.
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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…
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Ads benefit both you and the other group that they connect you. You finding out about, say, a product you are interested benefits you.
In theory, yes In actuality: they are a waste of my time and mental space
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https://gsuite.google.com/products/gmail/ About $60 a year I have about 8 accounts that I use.
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.