Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 460 posts

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#271

Post by mcbits »

dmix wrote: post #156
mrybczyn wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not trivial to match any arbitrary profile with an offline identity, but it is possible to cluster pseudonymous profiles into "almost certainly the same individual" by patterns and peculiarities in how they use their devices. If the same patterns later show up for an identified user, they can be linked with high probability.

With the sites Google runs plus running their own JavaScript on a sizable fraction of other people's web pages, they can pick up a lot of patterns, many of which would be inaccessible to police and intelligence surveillance.

Some people have nervous habits like moving the mouse around, clicking/tapping on whitespace, scrolling up and down, etc. Some always/never use the scrollbar. Some always/never open links in new tabs. Some tend to put the adjective before/after the noun in their searches. Some will rapidly open up the first 5 search results in new tabs. Some always disable instant search, and some of those change their settings to 20 or 50 or 100 results. Some use search features like the calculator, searching for "weather", stock symbols, etc, and others never do.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#272

Post by mojowo11 »

EGreg wrote: post #130
StreamBright wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather pay and do not share anything with Google (or for that matter all of Google's partners who can purchase our data)

You can, it's called Google Apps for Business.

Not to be pedantic, but it's called "G Suite" nowadays.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#274

Post by andybak »

tzs wrote: post #262
jikeo wrote: post #164

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…

Wouldn't Google be able to largely mitigate the effects of that if they wanted to by making it so accounts that do not consent to the scanning get smaller mailboxes or do not get spam filtering or something like that? I'd expect that would get most of its users to consent.

They could but is it worth it?

I suspect the scanning of emails hasn't yielded the personalization once hoped. And the bad publicity outweighs any future potential.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#275

Post by patkai »

Google will stop reading my emails for Gmail ads because I will stop using Gmail. It's kind of a sad story, because they are the good guys, but once they built a huge company they started to focus on maintaining it, possibly at any cost. This is a cautionary tale: power corrupts. You, me, everyone. And yes, the web will produce dictators we never imagined possible, because the Internet is so powerful it will enable them.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#276

Post by erikb »

jmull wrote: post #4

I should probably get fitted for a tinfoil hat because my immediate reaction was, "Oh shit! They must've developed something now that tracks you better and is less obvious."

The smartest reaction I've read so far. But if you learn to know the Director of Cloud, miss Greene, it gets less scary. She believes in a eat-or-be-eaten world as we live in today, an argument like energy friendly data centers would still be a thing. She might've just done it because it's the right thing to do.

We must keep an open eye though for the moment when she gets fired and replaced by a shark, like when she got fired from VMWare.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#277

Post by sqeaky »

luhn wrote: post #142
cookiecaper wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cannot recall where, but I remember reading about this. Based on associated products women buy occasionally they will sometimes get coupons for things like diapers and baby formula while they are pregnant before they know. My guess is that anytime a woman changes her shopping habits the marketers send some stuff her way because even a miss ratio of 90% could still be profitable.

It isn't always accurate, I know a girl that is very not pregnant but gets these things anyway. She babysits occasionally and I suspect that combined with her Baker's card and Walgreen's card give the mass marketing gurus all the information they need to know that she sometimes cares for kids.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#278

Post by hoschicz »

fav_collector wrote: post #100
eatbitseveryday wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Now there is the Android OS Does the actual OS track you or is it individual apps?

The Google Play Services package that is pre-installed on basically every Android phone with Google Play tracks you.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#279

Post by ouid »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #261
ouid wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No way that's true. The data is not worth as much as the eyeball on the ad itself.

gmail can still advertise to me in the hypothetical scenario above, but if they want to do so in a targeted way, they would have to buy my data from me first.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#280

Post by cm2012 »

openplatypus wrote: post #256
cm2012 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't, but most business folks use free gmail for their usual accounts.

> most business folks You have no idea how wrong you are.

Nonetheless, Gmail ads are great for B2B advertising at scale.
Post reply on HN