181–190 of 246 posts
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This is what finally prompted me to move to Fastmail after being on G Suite since 2007. Even though I have to pay for Fastmail and was grandfathered into free on G Suite. Pretty happy with it so far. Now going through the process of reducing all the places I use Google services. Moved my personal stuff from GCP to Digital Ocean. Gmail to Fastmail. Chrome to Firefox / Safari. Currently seeing if Zoho is a good substit…
Fastmail is unfortunately very bad too now due to recent Australian legislation.
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So it sounds like either someone is logged into your account, or one of your devices is infected
Neither — please see my other replies in this thread. I think it's interesting that people seem to find it so hard to believe that Google's software might be buggy.
(I didn't downvote BTW, happens to me all the time. People abuse it as a disagree button like on reddit, but it's even more toxic on this site as its only available to a subset of users)
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>Useful features attract users. Users are a good thing. I think its a bit of a stretch calling this feature useful but I suppose you can re-define anything to be useful. Ads are useful too, because you can save money by buying the exact thing that you need. Its too bad that people are downloading ad-blockers by the millions. Google snooping on emails and extracting purchase related information to stick inside a dossi…
So I've rehashed this argument a lot recently: Google has to snoop on your emails. Every email provider does. Spam classification, automatic labelling/filtering, things like the "we think this is phishing" banners, etc. all require some form of analysis. You could (and seem to be) calling some of that "snooping", but some of it is acceptable. So the question is where is the line drawn? > I think its a bit of a stretc…
Its not about a line. Advertising functionality is simply not a core function of an email service. It is something that is tolerated in exchange for a free service. That is not the same as ceding control and letting a vendor do anything they wish simply because a vendor claims its useful.
>It's used to alert you on upcoming packages you may receive or bills you need to pay (if you have an android phone/google assistant). I think that's useful.
Well, how does storing the item purchased and the dollar amount and other purchase details help with tracking anything? AFAIK Amazon for e.g. has stopped putting in tracking information in their emails. There could be a useful function as far as bills are concerned, but its weird to take an email about a bill and then generate another wasteful notification about the same bill. Or to take a package has shipped email and generate another notification. But that is a separate discussion.
Also, if Android and google assistant users have chosen to enable such features with informed consent, I don't see why every single gmail user has to have this this enabled. I mean that in a rhetorical way, I do see why an advertising company would do such a thing. Anyway, I'm simply registering a protest and I encourage other users to do the same. Several invasive Google policies were reversed due to privacy push-backs, and so all hope is not lost.
>The argument is that labels are useful to some people. Google could misuse the data derived from labels. Similarly, purchase history info is useful to some people. Purchase history data could be misused by Google. If you trust Google to not misused labels, then why don't you trust them to not misuse purchase history? If you do trust them in both cases, this doesn't matter, and if you don't trust them at all, why are you using an email client that you think is completely lying about how they're using your data?
That to me, is needlessly polarizing a nuanced issue. "Either you trust us completely or you don't" is not really an argument worth having is it?
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> They claim the list is there purely for your own personal consumption The problem is that they are constantly thinking along these lines, and building products to enable this. Also, they are an advertising company, so this is something that is of value to them. Fox guarding the hen-house stuff. In my mind, its kind of like hiring an IP lawyer at a company. Even if your company is not litigious, there is a chance th…
> What is the business justification? They want to give users the ability to inspect the source data for various further derived features they provide, like shipping notifications.
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This is what finally prompted me to move to Fastmail after being on G Suite since 2007. Even though I have to pay for Fastmail and was grandfathered into free on G Suite. Pretty happy with it so far. Now going through the process of reducing all the places I use Google services. Moved my personal stuff from GCP to Digital Ocean. Gmail to Fastmail. Chrome to Firefox / Safari. Currently seeing if Zoho is a good substit…
miss any flights yet? I find this feature insanely useful. Google is doing something useful with my email. I learn about delayed flights way way in advance of anyone else as a result. So let's just be clear here: - you get an email, to you, privately - gmail used to offer making a calendar for certain keywords in an email - google will now automatically do said calendar entries - on your PRIVATE calendar btw - google…
This whole thing is the culmination of years of singularity "the computer will expand the mind" rhetoric.
This isn't your mind being expanded, this isn't you thinking new thoughts.
This is what everyone has been trying to build for years. We are here. And all of a sudden it's creepy?
Kurzweil VoicePad and Dragon Naturally Speaking tried to build Voice Recognition on-device for years and it was a bright and techno future. Then Google Now, Siri, Cortana and Alexa got people to send speech samples over the internet to a foreign, perpetual-record, datacenter. The voice recognition part is better, but now it's creepy.
Email has been turned into a useful automatically actionable system. My family forwards their itineraries and I don't have do anything else, it's automatically calendared. That's probably the only reason I pick them up from the airport frankly.
Why doesn't Google forward their itinerary to Uber and have someone else pick them up at the airport, so you don't have to be involved in your life at all?
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I think the problem also is that Google scans incoming emails sent by non-google users who haven't agreed to such scanning. (Edit: also with personal domains, a sender may have no idea if this email will eventually find its way on Googles servers) > at least if you believe the news and Google's public statements, it doesn't use the contents of your email for ad targeting. True, but its important to note that it used…
> I think the problem also is that Google scans incoming emails sent by non-google users who haven't agreed to such scanning. That is definitely not the problem. Email you send is owned by its recipient. Generally, the recipient can do what they want with it, including delegating to Google and allowing Google to scan it for purchase information. > They didn't make it clear if they removed information mined from previ…
I don't agree that everyone thinks this is the case.
My new Pixel tracks songs that I've "listened to". I saw a few odd ones that I had never heard of was sure I didn't listened to. Until I realized ... it identified and logged songs in a movie my kids watched on a rainy day recently.
My new Pixel tracks songs that I've "listened to". I saw a few odd ones that I had never heard of was sure I didn't listened to. Until I realized ... it identified and logged songs in a movie my kids watched on a rainy day recently.
Did they watch the movie on your phone, or was it using the mic?
Apparently my phone just logs all the music it hears all the time and displays it on the lock screen.
There is an option to tell it to not listen all the time.