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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

#441

Post by hrktb »

crazygringo wrote: post #345
bootlooped wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first time I've ever heard a person worry about the quality of the ads that are served to them.

I've often wondered why nobody brings this up more. If you're going to see ads for things, why on earth wouldn't you want them to try to better target you? The whole point is for you to find out about things that might be useful for you. Why would I want less of the useful things? Why would I want worse advertising?

I think some people make the assumption they are targeted for products that might be beneficial for them. But why would that mostly be the case ? Someone with an online shopping problem would be a perfect target for a flurry of ads, and getting better targeted ads would just be screwing that person more and more.

Even in a saner scenario, the most informative ad you can imagine will still isolate you from the information you would have got by doing your own research. But since you have most of the information you wanted to have, you won't bother checking that much more.

IMO even in the best case scenario, helping people to be lazy on things they are interested in is counterproductive in the long term.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#442

Post by brianpan »

h1d wrote: post #439
chicob wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That directive might be related to what's happening. 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.

If people worry about passing email content to Google for privacy reasons, why use gmail? Seriously.

I believe the concern is everyone else using gmail compromising your privacy.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#443

Post by watwut »

rubber_duck wrote: post #409
jodrellblank wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm - you should avoid getting information because it might influence you to buy things? UMMMMMMmmmmm - yes? Obviously? If you wouldn't let a salesperson barge into your house, interrupt your reading to try and convince you to get discount eye surgery, why would you let that happen in visual form? in an ideal world ads would be just that - informing the customer about your product This is not anything like an 'ideal'…

>Ideal brains would search for what they need, and buy the most fitting thing. That's not really how things work - there are certain things you need to accomplish other things where your reasoning partially applies but even then it's debatable. But then there are things you do for pleasure - and how you value those things can be completely separate from their physical properties. For example there was a study[1] wher…

They are not creating value. They just mislead.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#444

Post by LaurensBER »

mistermann wrote: post #320
x0x0 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they're willing to take a loss on the ads -- which frankly don't make much money -- to go after the far more lucrative corporate emailing/calendaring market. The pricing is $5/$10/$higher per user-month, so walking away from an ads business that may possibly (but I doubt it) be earning hundreds of millions to avoid a cloud over your sales process for the aforementioned multi-billion dollar business seems like a so…

If they want me to use gmail for corporate email they better invest some effort in some UI & usability redesign.

They did.

Your mileage might vary but for me inbox is by far the most productive way to handle my e-mail.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#445

Post by chrismorgan »

StreamBright wrote: post #161
ams6110 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many options to pay for email, fastmail just for one. Do you use one of them?

And how exactly will I escape Google's data collection when Fastmail uses GA for analytics? ....script type="text/javascript" src="/static/scripts/ga.js....

That’s the marketing site; the actual app where you read your email definitely doesn’t have Google Analytics.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#446

Post by chrismorgan »

Veratyr wrote: post #250
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…

I tried Fastmail for a while but I just couldn't deal with the spam. There was a lot of spam and Gmail's filters seem to be better at dealing with it.

Something to bear in mind: when you use one spam filter for a while, it learns the sort of spam you get and will do a better job. When you switch to a new provider with a new spam filter, you have to train the new spam filter before it can be as good as the provider you left. (FastMail enables personal spam filters for improved results when it gets to 200 spam and 200 non-spam messages.)

Some find FastMail’s spam filtering better than Gmail’s, some worse.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#448

Post by pferde »

lostlogin wrote: post #393
applecrazy wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't offer unlimited data storage. 15GB to start and more can be purchased.

The storage offering was way way less than that when everyone here signed up, though it was still vastly greater than anything anyone else offered if memory serves.

Vastly indeed. There were even (one or two) pseudo-filesystems which used a Gmail account as a backend, because, hey, a free gigabyte!

I vaguely remember Google had to put their foot down to disallow such use, that's how popular those filesystems became.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GmailFS

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#449

Post by md_ »

slewis wrote: post #266
md_ wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Take a look at Basic Attention Token and the Brave browser.

Interesting. How do they protect against clickfraud, though? Paying the user seems to me (somewhat naively, because I'm not super familiar with clickfraud) to increase the incentive for abuse, since you don't have to run a malicious website to do it.

One of the obvious advantages of the Gmail model seems to me to be that free email is less fungible than cash, though of course abusers resort to spamming and other practices to monetize the resource.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#450

Post by Spivak »

hedora wrote: post #416
mistermann wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they want me to use gmail for corporate email they better invest some effort in some UI & usability redesign.

Or maybe they could improve IMAP availability until it is only a few orders of magnitude worse than my local ISP (or the previous one, or all the IT departments I've dealt with this millennium...)

Huh? I use GMail via IMAP and I can't think of any time I've had problems. Am I just not noticing them?
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