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Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

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Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#171

Post by omarforgotpwd »

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 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.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#172

Post by rconti »

ouid wrote: post #107
cybrjoe wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm sorry, I'm from Slashdot. Can you write this in the form of a car analogy?

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#173

Post by vaishaksuresh »

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.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#174

Post by sqeaky »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #155
ksk wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

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.

> data isn't shared with anyone else without my consent

Do 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.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#175

Post by jcranmer »

mtgx wrote: post #119
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you search your inbox? Or filter spam?

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.

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.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#177

Post by samblr »

vaishaksuresh wrote: post #173

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…

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 ?

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#179

Post by DerfNet »

vaishaksuresh wrote: post #173

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…

Is there any reason not to go with ProtonMail? They seem to be the big recommendation lately for encrypted email service.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#180

Post by ksk »

luhn wrote: post #142
cookiecaper wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/s…

> 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.

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.

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