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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

#451

Post by stubish »

Not scanning emails for ads? Corporate business?

I wonder if Google will be pushing end-to-end email encryption? They have already had some experiments on it.

They have the majority browser, they have the lions share of email hosting. It they played their cards right, they could claim the entire email ecosystem, except for the small portion who won't use Google products on principle. The questions would be would 3rd party clients be allowed, and how would Apple fight it.

Or maybe this is all just a smoke screen to sucker dumb corps. In the existing architecture, your emails still need to be scanned so they can be indexed for search. You could get the same result scanning these indexes as scanning the emails themselves, so from a privacy perspective it could be a non-event.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#452

Post by marcopol »

joering2 wrote: post #325
vaishaksuresh wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No particular reason, I just knew fastmail from many years ago and liked them.

I emailed them (Proton) on few occasions with important questions and never got a single response. That alone turned me off. Will go with Fastmail very soon moving my yahoo since Verizon bought them.

Where did you email them? They're known to have one of the best support out there.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#453

Post by dwighttk »

dgacmu wrote: post #154
dwighttk wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how about: my accountant preparing my tax return for free in exchange for... inviting ...a sleazy salesman [to] sneak a peek at them and find new ways to sell me stuff.

That's not very accurate. It's more like: Your accountant prepares your tax return for free. They also have a lot of boxes of flyers provided to them by people who want to sell things. After preparing your tax return, they use their knowledge of your return to choose which flyer to put into the envelope. They then send that envelope back to you, and when you open it to read your tax return, there's a flyer for someth…

Unfortunately for you the accountant uses an insecure lock on the office door.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#454

Post by Ajedi32 »

pdkl95 wrote: post #375
Ajedi32 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is a large, generally reputable company which has very little to gain and everything to lose by sharing my personal information with others in violation of their own privacy policy. In the absence of any evidence that they _are_ sharing my private information with others, I see no reason not to trust them in this regard.

> everything to lose Really? Good luck suing them if they decide to sell your data. They certainly won't lose much revenue from fleeing customers if they think up a creative new way to monetize your data with "select business partners"; Google (and Facebook et al ) spent the last decade entrenching themselves infrastructure for far too many people. They have far too much power and inertia to lose much in the short or…

> They certainly won't lose much revenue from fleeing customers

I don't think that's true. Sure, they wouldn't be out of business overnight, but depending on how serious this hypothetical breach of trust is, it'd certainly hurt them a lot.

> Warrants, legislation, and quasi-legal-but-hard-to-ignore orders from governments happen

My threat model does not currently include the NSA or the US government. I don't anticipate that changing in the near future, but if it does then you're right; I'll certainly need to stop using Google services. (And probably all cloud services in general.) Or at least "air gap" them from the portions of data I want to keep secret.

> pretend that Googles security is and always will be perfect [...] that no current or future Google employee will ever become disgruntled

While I consider myself to be more security conscious than the average citizen, I _still_ trust Google's security practices (against both internal and external threats) far more than I trust my own. If my data on Google's services gets compromised, I think it's far more likely that it'll be because someone stole my password and 2FA tokens than because somebody hacked Google.

As with anything, I realize there's certainly a security/usability tradeoff to be made. For the moment though I'm quite confident that the extra utility Google provides is worth the risk, at least for my purposes.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#455

Post by frabcus »

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.

I had that problem, and fixed it by doing these four things:

* Train the built in Bayesian filter fully * Setup SPF * Setup DKIM * Point MX records at Fastmail directly (rather than forwarding via some other service)

More of a pain than GMail which often "just works", but still relatively simple to setup. I suspect ultimately more robust than using mail forwarding on consumer GMail (the rules of which constantly change and it gets less powerful, if you don't buy GSuite and point your whole domain at it).

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#457

Post by ionised »

EGreg wrote: post #127
dingaling wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like my accountant reading my receipts to create my tax return versus a sleazy salesman sneaking a peek at them to find new ways to sell me stuff.

I don't understand why seeing an ad is so bad. So a sleazy salesman is more annoying because they are in your way. But if you're going to see ads anyway, I'd rather they be relevant!! Can soemone explain why given that there will be ads either way they actually prefer irrelevant ads?

> I don't understand why seeing an ad is so bad.

Ads are an insidious and highly effective form of psychological warfare. They play on human fears, insecurities, neuroses and instinctual weaknesses in order to part people from their hard-earned time and resources.

You might say the ads just bring their attention to needs they didn't know they had. I would say the opposite, that they create needs where there none existed to begin with.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#458

Post by ionised »

sqeaky wrote: post #306
sqeaky wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> data isn't shared with anyone else without my consent Do you have any way of verifying this? I am not accusing google of anything, I just find this to be an interesting level of trust to have with a free online service.

I am curious about the downvotes. Do we really downvote people here for questioning trusting Google? I didn't even say not to trust google, I just questioned the level of trust.

You'd be surprised.

It's a common phenomenon across a variety of social media when a certain few companies are questioned on their practices.

It's all very tribal.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#459

Post by ionised »

briandear wrote: post #281
thomasahle wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/fr…

I'm curious as to where you are getting your statistics on people disappeared by the intelligence services that you can say this.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#460

Post by ionised »

samblr wrote: post #177
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…

how are you sure that fastmail is secure and they aren't using ur data to build models ? because there is an annual subscription or they advertise it so ?

Reputations are important to build trust.

Fatmail has a reptuation for not doing this, Google doesn't.

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