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> I was interested in making [Gmail] freely available and came up with the ads system. This decision set a terrible precedent. It made it acceptable for a com
by pdog 9y ago
> I was interested in making [Gmail] freely available and came up with the ads system.
This decision set a terrible precedent.
It made it acceptable for a company to deliver "tailored advertising" by reading all your emails.
But I guess there are few alternatives to the ad-supported business model on the web facilitated by the vast collection of personal data.
Still kind of sucks, though.
- hodgesrm 9y agoI don't see how you avoid some company reading your email and still have automatically indexed, infinitely scalable email in-boxes. Gmail is still the best game in town for this reason. The AI features are getting increasingly good--Gmail automatically creates calendar entries based on email content which is a pretty nice feature. More generally most cloud services are going to have the same properties. It would be more useful to define clear bounds of what companies can do with your data and back them up with workable legal protections.
- beat 9y agoI welcome our new robot overlords. The data mining and the ads are the price I pay for such incredibly useful services, that don't cost me anything but a small bit of attention. And even the ads are good, because they're so nicely targeted.
- jholman 9y agoI think that if the tradeoff were privacy vs automatic indexing, I'd be on the fence. And scalable doesn't require them to read our email; storage is nearly free. And the AI assistance features could run on a machine I own, without El Goog needing to be able to read my email. However, I really appreciate Google's ability to block spam, and I don't know of any way to make that work (at this level of quality) without a centralized service sharing spam-flagging between millions of users.
- big_spammer 9y ago> I don't see how you avoid some company reading your email and still have automatically indexed, infinitely scalable email in-boxes. It's possible to with encrypted search.