201–210 of 460 posts
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How would you search your inbox? Or filter spam?
this could be done locally, it doesn't use that much processing power
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> 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.
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?!?!
1. the site was actually what I typed in the address but forgot to add .com etc
2. by accident
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.
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.
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
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.kempli…
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.
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...
And yet everyone's up in arms if GCHQ / NSA does it.
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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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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.
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.
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?
Wee yeah - it says they will no longer scan emails.... Instead they will use your youtube data, search data, website visit data etc.
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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.
> 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…
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.
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.