Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#281

Post by briandear » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 10:14 PM UTC

thomasahle wrote: post #205

DanBC wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet everyone's up in arms if GCHQ / NSA does it.

NSA doing it is a lot worse. There is no transparency on what they do. I get no benefits in return for sharing my data. They have license to do all kinds of nasty things to me, that Google would have to go through a court for. From blocking my flights to making me disappear at night.

No benefits? That’s bit like saying that security screenings at airports offer no benefit to anyone. While security screenings are inefficient and could be improved, that doesn’t mean they offer zero benefit.

Also what’s the likelihood of the NSA blocking your flight or making you disappear in the night? You probably should fear crossing the street more in terms of statistical likelihood of harm.

I get the privacy/freedom arguments however the hyperbole around this stuff is getting ridiculous as the fears are badly supported by actual data and statistical significance.

More people drowned in swimming pools last year than were “disappeared” by the NSA but there seems little hysteria around swimming pools. I pretty sure most of us don’t know a single person on a no-fly list.

Some high levels of paranoia around here it seems.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#282

Post by zeep » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 10:15 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #201

zeep wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this could be done locally, it doesn't use that much processing power

It can probabky be done if you're using a email client. Webapp (like gmail)? Probably not feasible because of how much data you need to download every time.

if only they would offer that option... at least for the android client

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#283

Post by zeep » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 10:16 PM UTC

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."

That or they will have someone else read the emails for them... like the NSA. Also, all "cloud" emails older than 6 months don't require a warrant to be obtained [1].

1. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/congress...

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#284

Post by briandear » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 10:16 PM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #232

ksk wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gets to the heart of how divisions inside a company justify their budget and where human self-preservation kicks in. For e.g. A lawyer inside the company HAS to be on the lookout for supposed infringements of IP or situations where their "expertise" is required. The idea is that once you have any apparatus in place, and funds allocated to the maintenance/operation there of, you will find that people come up with…

Of course its trivial to steal data if you're on the inside. Snowden could copy classified docs onto a USB stick and smuggle them out of a fucking NSA office. If I were to plug in a USB drive at work, no one would bat an eye. They'd probably think it's for Time Machine.

It really depends on where you work. I know of a little company in the Cupertino area where such data theft would be nearly impossible and yet other companies, engineers have full access to production databases.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#285

Post by base698 » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 10:17 PM UTC

sqeaky wrote: post #277

luhn wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 g…

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhil...

They were doing this in early 2000s, can't imagine how sophisticated the same type of system is now.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#286

Post by askvictor » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 10:19 PM UTC

joosters wrote: post #219

SN76477 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So will any host. When you are paying for it though, the terms of service clearly define what is collected and what it's used for, and you can choose to enable or disable that type of data matching

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#287

Post by albinowax_ » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 10:19 PM UTC

samblr wrote: post #192

bthrn wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They advertise it as such. From their privacy policy: "Incoming messages are scanned for the purpose of spam detection unless you disable spam protection for your account... To make message searching fast, we build an index of your messages (this is a table, just like you would find at the back of a reference book, in which you can look up a word to quickly find the emails in which it appears). No information from an…

Is it generally possible to reconstruct email(=text) with indicies if they are stolen/hacked ? Although Im not questioning fastmail ability to provide secured email service. Yet I cannot help think why I would rely on a small player for email. I would ask what is the probability of fastmail service getting hacked say compared to gmail. (Somebody has right pointed out that ) Ad relevance to your email is not same as r…

I'm a security person, and I've found vulnerabilities in both fastmail and various core google services (although not gmail).

Fastmail and gmail both have mature bug bounty programs, which mean they will pay out cash to anyone who finds and reports a way to hack them: https://www.fastmail.com/about/bugbounty.html This shows that they are willing to put money behind their claims to security and probably puts them in the top few % of difficult to hack websites above eg windows live mail.

Also, it's a mistake to think a company will be more secure because it's larger. If anything, I'd say it's the opposite; large companies tend to have complex websites with vastly more attack surface.

Of course, every email provider is vulnerable to certain governments.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#288

Post by eh78ssxv2f » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 10:22 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #159

skrause wrote: post #33

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.

I think "consent" is important here. GMail does it with the consent of the user.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#289

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 10:29 PM UTC

chicob wrote: post #204

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…

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.

Exactly. Google already knows a shit ton about you, and given how data driven they are, I guarantee they came to the conclusion that they would still be able to show highly targeted ads with little or no loss in revenue or click-through-rates rates. Heck, dollars to donuts they've already A/B tested the shit out of it to reach this conclusion.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#290

Post by jshelly » Fri, Jun 23, 2017, 10:31 PM UTC

erikb wrote: post #273

jshelly wrote: post #269

And I am in the middle of migrating to icloud from google. Not going to stop at this point.

Not sure if sarcasm or serious stupidity. Please clarify.

neither, serious, why?

You seem to comment frequently here on HN where I consider most users to be above average in the level of intelligent replies so your trolling seems quite out of place.