I like this feature. It has always been there on Inbox.
See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
91–100 of 117 posts
Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
If all they're doing is presenting your data in a better way then it's great. However, it's very likely that they're also selling adverts based on that data, and possibly selling the data itself. Do you really want your health insurance provider to be able to buy a list of restaurant bookings you've made? Or how about the airline you're about to book with knowing what you paid a competitor last time so they don't nee…
I think this comment is a great example of why I think most of the privacy concerns, especially around Google these days, are mostly overblown. I am not afraid of that example happening because that is not how Google operates. Google makes money by connecting ads to search queries. An advertiser makes an ad, says "make it appear for the term 'xbox'", and it shows up on Google for searches of Xbox. The advertiser has…
You’re thinking of the Data Liberation Front, who built the feature known as Takeout.
Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
If all they're doing is presenting your data in a better way then it's great. However, it's very likely that they're also selling adverts based on that data, and possibly selling the data itself. Do you really want your health insurance provider to be able to buy a list of restaurant bookings you've made? Or how about the airline you're about to book with knowing what you paid a competitor last time so they don't nee…
I think this comment is a great example of why I think most of the privacy concerns, especially around Google these days, are mostly overblown. I am not afraid of that example happening because that is not how Google operates. Google makes money by connecting ads to search queries. An advertiser makes an ad, says "make it appear for the term 'xbox'", and it shows up on Google for searches of Xbox. The advertiser has…
No. Google makes money off connecting ads to profiles.
The vast majority of ads you see are not on search result pages. They’re on arbitrary non-google related pages, so to make that work google has basically moved to a “track everything this person does online so we can build and sell a profile of them”.
Your argument about data privacy is a nonsense - what matters is data security - Their business depends on them being able to read the information they have accumulated and then indirectly selling it. That is fundamentally opposed to data privacy - which would mean only you could read that information.
You say apple doesn’t have the same “privacy” requirements, but what you mean is the Apple isn’t dependent on their users data for income. Even then Apple encrypts ever increasing amounts of user data so that even if they are compromised the data isn’t useful to anyone.
If google did care about privacy then when your email came in they would filter spam, encrypt, and then discard the plaintext. That’s the best you can do because email security is laughable by design. They’d still have huge amounts of information, but at the very least they wouldn’t be able to retroactively crawl your mail box.
Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
#94Just one perspective: When it comes to scraping data and storing in single entity (Google servers), it's more about powering the ecosystem than a single client or the UI.
Google doesn't just live in a single client. As a user (by giving up my privacyto Google), I can ask my Google home how my day is while getting ready for work. I can see the status of my flight tomorrow in my Google app (or Google home screen in Android) without a single search - just because it parsed my email with itinerary. Same way, I can see status for my FedEx package right there just because they violeted my privacy and scraped when I purchased something.
Imagine how much friction it'd require to setup such devices if everything was processed on client side or required explicit opt-in before accessing the info.
Of course as a side effect, I get advertisements of standing desk even a month after buying one, but probably the alternative would be to pay for all these AI and assist?
Again, just a user's perspective.
Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> when reality finally strikes them with all of its might. In case someone accuses @ve55 of melodrama, "reality" could be as banal as your most embarrassing personal emails leaking to the world.
That seems like an argument against centralized mail hosts, which is a very different thing that what this thread is ostensibly for.
If third parties have access your mail db, it's more like a "decentralized mail host" ;)
That said, I see someone changed the title of the post. Now discussion here will be about two completely different subjects.
Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't think up a single reason why you might not want every purchase you've made in your entire life to be logged in a centralized database completely outside of your control and view which will be kept forever and shared with an unknowable amount of unknown powerful entities that do not care about your well-being? Some people are going to have a very rough time when reality finally strikes them with all of its m…
They already have my email receipts, what's the difference? I use venmo - they have it too. My credit card companies are private companies. Where's the outrage regarding them? Google does not reveal my identity to partners; What you're spreading is fake news.
> What you're spreading is fake news.
I suggest avoiding this phrase if you are trying to have a serious debate. It's overused to the point of obnoxiousness, and doesn't even apply here. (The person you replied to posed a question. Questions are not "news", nor can be described as "fake".)
Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
#97I've always assumed they do this since they've recognized and surfaced flight and event information for years. I thought about switching my email to iCloud but I'm afraid Apple's going to change the domain yet again. And gmail is hella reliable. Google of old might have done something cool with this info and annotated the purchases with something like "14,391 people bought this for an average of $1.08 less" or "you p…
Fastmail rocks. And Apple keeps the old domains, so my me.com email works fine. I never use icloud.com.
Completely agree about fastmail. Been a happy customer for a few years now. Easy to migrate from gmail too. Enjoying it all the more since the "upgrade" of gmail's web-ui.
Fastmail isn't free, but I think the old adage "if you're given a really cool product for free, then the product us you" applies here. If you're ok with that, that's cool. But if you're not, there are some great options out there.
Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why can't this be done offline?
To build offline, Google would still need access to (some subset) of data at some point to train the models / write the heuristics.
Sure, but why does it have to be my data? Can't they do it on data they already have, or maybe as their employees to run it (who presumably have much more control over how the data is actually used)?
Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
#99This is one of my favorite features of Inbox. Sounds like more transparency is required but overall this is pretty nice to have.
Its nice data for me to have and creepy data for google to have. In an ideal world it would be processed locally.
Re: See all your purchases, subscriptions and reservations
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why can't this be done offline? Where? On every device a user owns?
That’s what Apple does to some extend. “Siri found in mail” contacts and events. Maybe some more.
Siri pulls from Messages for those things as well, and will pull spelling and other suggestions out of Safari browsing.