331–340 of 460 posts
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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And yet everyone's up in arms if GCHQ / NSA does it.
Corporations didn't murder a hundred million of their own customers in the last century alone. It takes a government to do that. Consequently, governments have to be held to higher standards, not lower ones.
Yes, they did. Probably just tobacco companies alone.
> It takes a government to do that.
Since corporations are creatures of government, that's true by definition of everything corporations do.
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The problem is that it's not just your email. If you send an email to a Gmail user, Google is now building a profile on you (or was until this move) as well as your recipient. Did you give explicit consent to Google? Did you sign a EULA or SLA with them allowing this? No, they just did it anyway. Even someone who makes a point to keep themselves off of Google's radar will end up indexed and sold to the highest bidder…
Building profiles of senders can be necessary, e.g., for detecting spammer accounts. Also, email is transmitted in plain text. Sending an email is more like shouting to your friends in the street, rather than putting a letter into an envelope mailed to the recipient. Thus, I don't think an explicit consent is needed. That said, I understand that fair use of such information is a concern.
These days Gmail will transfer your email protected by TLS if possible. Not shouting at all.
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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…
> 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 with profit Hmm. Could you sell it on the open market? If so--if the margins for the ad-supported model like Google's are in fact as big as they appear--why isn't there a Google competitor who provides exactly the service you describe: some kind of opt-in system…
surely the profit would be too small to fool anyone
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Not that few - more than 1 in 10 emails sent and received by Gmail are unencrypted: https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/saferemail/
That's higher than I would have expected. The question though, is who is not allowing encrypted emails? I wonder if it's mostly just China.
The Chinese government can just ask QQ and 163 for your email such that they don't need to see it in transit. Less work, too.
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I doubt it. That's a pretty big "if".
If they're not using it for ads, there's a good chance that it's in Google's best interest to not know the contents of people's email. It lessens the impact of a potential breach, and it greatly simplifies their responses to gov't requests to 'we have no method to access this data, you must contact the account holder directly'.
This most likely is a pragmatic financial decision. Contextual advertising is generating a lower CPM than data/person based advertising. Said differently the relevance that can be extracted from your specific email is less than the cumulative knowledge that Google has about you from other sources.
This is 100% conjecture, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was this domain targeting (which is what many advertisers were using) that was the thing that Google's big clients were complaining about.
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https://gsuite.google.com/products/gmail/ About $60 a year I have about 8 accounts that I use.
This hardly frees you from Google's data gathering. They will have records of your IP address used to collect the emails and your access history, so they know (roughly) where you live, what times of day you are active, and can probably infer stuff like when you are on holiday. If you are in the same house as someone else, they probably use Google too and the shared IP address lets Google tie the two identities togeth…