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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 "readi

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...

dingaling 9y ago
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.
- cybrjoe 9y ago
  It's more like your accountant preparing your tax return for free in exchange for aggregating data about your receipts and offering you goods and services you may be interested in.
  - skrebbel 9y ago
    > and offering you goods and services you may be interested in. Sounds like a sleazy salesman to me.
  - ouid 9y ago
    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 with profit, and the tax prep service would still exist.
    - dmix 9y ago
      > The value of this model is more than the cost of them doing your tax returns It's likely the value Google got out of scanning your email wasn't worth that much in terms of modelling profiles for ads. Probably because having both your search history and "anonymized" Google analytics, plus the sea of data that comes from owning Android is more than enough data that Google/Doubleclick needs. From a purely capitalist perspective I'd bet the utility of them scraping this data no longer outweighs the privacy costs. But at the same time Google is still scanning attachments for child porn and likely other data out of national security interests. And they still can access your data on a case-by-case basis which from a FISA perspective is a rubber-stamp away from accessing your data from 2 hops away from someone who may or may not have done something bad. I personally will not weigh using Google vs any other email service in terms of privacy any different after this measure. But I still appreciate their efforts to reduce the "standard pratice" nature of scanning private email. If I do use anything Google-related I will not associate my personal identity in any way with the service, which is still requirement for Google play. You can still use a fake gmail account and prepaid Google gift cards bought with cash to disassociate your identity from using the service. Although that's still well beyond the investment the majority of people are willing to make. Regardless privacy comes at a cost these days. Good OPSEC > trusting cloud services privacy policy. You can either not use the services or invest in protecting your data when using them. I will still cheer on Google's efforts to make those of us who care about privacy live's easier. I'm not naive enough to ignore how their business model works but that doesn't mean they always have to take the easy route and hand everything over without considering the costs - as many ISP/Telecom companies seem to do.
      - ouid 9y ago
        I disagree with you, but from the perspective that my email contains the history of every transaction I have ever made, all of the newsletters I sign up to, and, for another 3 days, ~50% of my conversations, since I do a good chunk of my communicating over gChat. Consumer preferences change over time, so google is far more interested in the thing I bought yesterday than the thing I bought 4 months ago, so being able to read my emails is still a current interest of theirs.
        cpeterso 9y ago
        Amazon's receipt emails stopped including an itemized breakdown. Perhaps this is for customer privacy or perhaps so Google can no longer scrape Gmail users' purchase histories.
        brewdad 9y ago
        True, but seeing as I often order one thing or two at a time, the email subject line from Amazon still gives away the goods
      - mrybczyn 9y ago
        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.
        dmix 9y ago
        > 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 firms and most government programs. If you're an activist or someone interested in keeping your internet activity private then the bar is far higher (and the targets of which are ever expanding as governments and private organizations get better at this stuff). FBI agents, or likewise in your country of residence, have plenty of forensic tools at their disposal to connect disparate identities. It takes some real time investment and requires being super careful to evade these measures. But I'm not talking about that here. I mean the average person in 2017. I've personally done the total anonymity stuff as an experiment so I know what that takes. Having studied many documents from the various global national security organizations and being fortunate to have dated a defense attorney in the past who engaged with police surveillance reports on a daily basis for their work I'm convinced that even basic privacy measures such as never using your real identity when using internet services, creating full legitimate sounding backstories (and subsequent online profiles) for your fake identity, and changing the ID you use often enough will throw off most basic surveillance measures. I'm not doing anything to get people really invested in uncovering my online identities, as most people aren't, which is what I'm talking about. The simple fact is the vast, vast majority of people reuse the same username (and passwords) across the internet and use their real name and emails everywhere. So it's really not hard to track people online from an LEO or 4chan doxxing perspective. But I'm not convinced you have to be isolated from the utility of most online (cloud) services. You just have to invest in using them intelligently to not associate your actual identity with the services. Ad companies aren't interested in deanonymizing people anyway. They are looking for low hanging fruit and there are more than enough people to fill databases who fit this profile. So I'm not that concerned about those who don't.
    - ErrantX 9y ago
      > 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 with profit, and the tax prep service would still exist. Economies of scale; the market for that data would not exist if individuals collected it themselves to sell. Hence would break down. Phrased another way; this data about 1 person is relatively valueless. (I like the rest of your example BTW; just disagree with your conclusion)
    - rconti 9y ago
      I'm sorry, I'm from Slashdot. Can you write this in the form of a car analogy?
    - tajen 9y ago
      ...Are you aware it would be quite a worthy idea, offering an accountant in exchange of business data?
    - Zhenya 9y ago
      I think this EXACT thing is what Credit Karma is doing with free tax returns: https://www.creditkarma.com/tax https://www.creditkarma.com/tax
    - md_ 9y ago
      > 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 with profit Hmm. Could you sell it on the open market? If so--if the margins for the ad-supported model like Google's are in fact as big as they appear--why isn't there a Google competitor who provides exactly the service you describe: some kind of opt-in system where they collect data (via, say, a browser extension), sell it to advertisers, and pay you a cut? One generic answer to "why does the market not offer [some seemingly reasonable thing]" is inefficiency: maybe there's some cartel system at work where all major advertisers are hoarding the revenue for themselves. But I find that pretty unconvincing, since the whole market _seems_ to be otherwise quite competitive, and with low barriers to entry. Perhaps a more likely theory is that if you were to offer a "we pay you for personal data" competitor, you'd face massive fraud--a la click fraud--in which attackers would pretend to be real users in order to get paid for searching (or whatever), and that the subsequent need for identity verification would become so burdensome as to eat away any profits. Anyway, an interesting thought exercise, but I think one can broadly conclude that either: 1. There are real obstacles to paying people the "fair" price for their data, such that the current system is in fact fairer than it appears. 2. The entire market is unfair due to a cartel or similar (though like I said, I find this fairly unconvincing). 3. This is a great idea and you're the first to have it, so you should start a company that does exactly this. ;) No?
      - slewis 9y ago
        Take a look at Basic Attention Token and the Brave browser.
        md_ 9y ago
        Interesting. How do they protect against clickfraud, though? Paying the user seems to me (somewhat naively, because I'm not super familiar with clickfraud) to increase the incentive for abuse, since you don't have to run a malicious website to do it. One of the obvious advantages of the Gmail model seems to me to be that free email is less fungible than cash, though of course abusers resort to spamming and other practices to monetize the resource.
      - 9y ago
    - KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago
      No way that's true. The data is not worth as much as the eyeball on the ad itself.
      - ouid 9y ago
        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.
  - dwighttk 9y ago
    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.
    - dgacmu 9y ago
      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 something else paperclipped to the front with a note saying "Thought you might find this interesting." (In particular, the accountant is only one who sees the information in your tax return.)
      - dwighttk 9y ago
        Unfortunately for you the accountant uses an insecure lock on the office door.
  - isomorphic 9y ago
    > offering you goods and services you may be interested in The thing is: never, not even once, has Google offered me an ad with goods and services I was interested in.
    - jpeg_hero 9y ago
      ok, maybe Gmail ads have been irrelevant to you. but surely you've done a google search and been presented with interesting goods and services?!?!
      - bostik 9y ago
        Anecdata: in the past 5 years or so the number of relevant or interesting search ads Google has shown me can be counted with one hand. - If I'm searching for technical documentation, I couldn't care less about all the random consultancies or shitty-SaaS-of-the-day trash that populate the ad slot(s). - If I'm looking for technical details on a piece of malware or vulnerability research, the last thing I want to see on the page is a goddamn AV junkware full-frontal. - If I'm searching for details on some car models ... why the fk is google shoving insurance ads on my screen real estate? And so on. As far as I'm concerned, online advertising is a stripmined toxic dump. Only the shittiest swindlers and shadiest extortion artists remain.
        pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        >- If I'm searching for details on some car models ... why the fk is google shoving insurance ads on my screen real estate? // Brand marketing. It may not work on you, but it works in general. Personally I consider myself pretty imune to marketing but when you think "who else should I check to switch my car insurance to" then that brand is going to pop up if it's been fed to your brain enough. Indeed when you're looking at a list of similar offers the one that's associated with a name you already know will seem somehow more trustsworthy, it's an insidious finagling of a brand in to your brain drip by drip. Why do they do it? It works.
      - takeda 9y ago
        The only times I clicked on those was: 1. the site was actually what I typed in the address but forgot to add .com etc 2. by accident
  - gitlabuser 9y ago
    Here's a real life example. It's like Credit Karma who prepares your tax return for free, but then uses the info to help target you for ads on credit cards, loans, etc. [this is exactly happening]
  - CamperBob2 9y ago
    It's more like your accountant preparing your tax return for free in exchange for aggregating data about your receipts and offering you goods and services you may be interested in. Hmm. I could actually see that working, as a spinoff of concierge services offered by companies like American Express.
  - belorn 9y ago
    If its about offering me goods and services that I may be interested in, then ad blocking is a useful feature for both me and the advertiser. If I am not interested in any goods or services then no offering or aggregation is needed. On the other hand, if its about offering me good and services which other companies want me to become interested in, then we have a different deal going on.
  - Markoff 9y ago
    can your accountant prepare your taxes without looking at your receipts? no. can webmail provider provide you email service without asking your emails? sure he can
- EGreg 9y ago
  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?
  - bostik 9y ago
    > I'd rather they be relevant Corollary: if you can't show a relevant ad, HOW ABOUT NOT SHOWING AN IRRELEVANT AT ALL?
    - EGreg 9y ago
      Actually, it is not a corollary.
  - watwut 9y ago
    Relevant ad is euphemism for "ad that makes you buy stuff you would happily not own otherwise". Since ads in general work (they make people buy more or different stuff) and you can not objectively evaluate whether you was influenced by ads, it is rational to avoid them. Practically, once add service knows I am women, it insist on showing me ads for menstruation cups everywhere I browse. I also find juxtaposition of baby accessories and relaxation bullshit on metal, programming or games site mood killing. When they know less about me, I actually get less weird more neutral less crappy ads.
    - rubber_duck 9y ago
      >Relevant ad is euphemism for "ad that makes you buy stuff you would happily not own otherwise". Since ads in general work (they make people buy more or different stuff) and you can not objectively evaluate whether you was influenced by ads, it is rational to avoid them. Umm - you should avoid getting information because it might influence you to buy things ? There's nothing wrong with what you said, in an ideal world ads would be just that - informing the customer about your product - and influencing their decisions with information. The psychological marketing tricks to make a thing more attractive is also a value add. Problem is it's easy to be misleading, create disinformation and it can be very profitable - that's what leads to shitty borderline fraudulent ads we have.
- fserb 9y ago
  if you accountant was a computer. We have to stop this madness of thinking that "John READS my diary" means the same thing as "The function fread() READS nitems objects". Those don't mean the same thing except in a metaphorical sense. It's insane.
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    why does it matter? Google has access to read my email, and if they want (or are pushed to), they can single me out and then go and read them. Sure, 9/10 times it's a bot reading my emails, but there's nothing stopping them from doing it.
    - fserb 9y ago
      it matters exactly because of what you are saying. You do have protections against someone reading your email at Google. Both from a expectation of privacy, but also from a company perspective. You also do have some non-expectation of privacy (if, for example, the US government wants to read your google email, they can ask for it and they eventually will). The day someone with a brain and an opinion on Kim Kardashian at Google reads your email, there is a HUGE difference from when Google is "reading" your email for ads/spam/spelling/whatever. You don't want to blur that line being wishywashy with language. You want to know that difference. The fact that it could happen is why you need that clear separation between "machine reading" and "a person reading".
      - CaptSpify 9y ago
        > You do have protections against someone reading your email at Google. And those protections are bullshit. I have no guarantee that they are not reading my email. If a bot has access, a person has access, and people abuse their access all the time. In fact, there have been cases of googlers reading peoples email. And I'm not blurring any line, I'm stating: Gmail can, has been, and will be abused. To pretend that is not the case is, frankly, naive.
        jsmthrowaway 9y ago
- h1d 9y ago
  Why try to pretend Google is nice to you? If their spam filter gathers the most relevant words and keep them stored for admins to look for the sake of tuning or whatever and maybe the admin also works in the ad department, perhaps checking on your email isn't for ad targeting. You need to give up on your content the day you started using gmail, no matter what the TOS says.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
roywiggins 9y ago
The spam filter is for my benefit, but scanning for ad keywords is designed to benefit someone else, not me.
- blowski 9y ago
  To play Devil's advocate, the ads benefit you because they make Gmail free.
  - StreamBright 9y ago
    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)
    - ams6110 9y ago
      There are many options to pay for email, fastmail just for one. Do you use one of them?
      - emodendroket 9y ago
        Google isn't just an e-mail service, really.
        thomasfoster96 9y ago
        But… you don’t really have to use Gmail to use most of Google’s other products, just as you don’t really have to use (actively) Google+ to use other Google products either.
        emodendroket 9y ago
        But imagine you use an Android phone, for instance. There's a whole bunch of integrated stuff that works well together that wouldn't if you had a Google account and then kept your e-mail somewhere else. It's not really a 1:1 comparison.
cookiecaper 9y ago
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/storing it off-site long-term, and it's very specific to the individuals involved. All of us who've used Gmail know how creepy it can get. Send a couple of mails about marriage and suddenly you start seeing targeted ads about engagement rings or other marriage-related things. 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". This inference is not only dubious (ethically and technically), but anyone observing your browsing while you're logged in will see these ads and may assume that you're seeing those ads because you've been searching for information on divorce, not because Google's inference is overzealous, although it may very well be. Search and replace with anything else: new credit cards/bankruptcy lawyers, research on a medical condition/ads for related medicines, etc.; the potential for creepy inference is endless, not to mention the concrete surveillance value provided to literal spies (via PRISM), nor the risk of compromise/abuse outside of the ad space. They don't have to get and process your entire mail archive; they just have to draw their inferences from Google's own inferences in your compiled taste/interest profile. That's much more serious than a throwaway analysis of whether a mail contains spammy properties or not.
- luhn 9y ago
  > 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.
  - ksk 9y ago
    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 creative ways to use that apparatus to either cement their position in the company or to improve career prospects. This applies to lots of domains, the obvious one being the government. Once you have a drone program, you'll find that someone somewhere WILL find a way to justify its usefulness. My main problem with data collection is the permanent nature of it, where someone somewhere at some point in time, possibly when the computational costs become feasible, will come up with a seemingly innocuous use of the data that will spiral out of control. Also, is Google hack-proof? Judging by the lawsuits around the self-driving division, apparently its trivial to steal data if you're on the inside.
bradjohnson 9y ago
One requires google to build a profile and have the knowledge in order to serve you their advertisements and the other can be done almost entirely client side. The spam filter doesn't need to phone home for anything other than updating the list.
austincheney 9y ago
In the US a service provider is allowed to violate all manners of privacy for the express limitation of ensuring maintenance and system health. Spam blocking would qualify as maintenance, but advertising would not. I suspect Google violates all manners of privacy in an automated way for all manners of reasons and qualifies such in their terms and conditions.
ksk 9y ago
Does the automated nature of the permanent data collection change anything? How about an automated drone with a camera mounted on it that follows you everywhere and records every action, indefinitely, purely automated ofcource, so that an advertising company can helpfully remind you about the awesome great $6 lunch menu when you walk past McBurger at lunchtime, or about picking up some hemorrhoids cream from MediCo because a machine learning algorithm saw you scratch your butt and deduced something.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  Depends. Is that drone providing me with some other useful service, or is it following me around entirely without my knowledge or consent? Gmail provides me with a free email service. They already have the full text of all my emails. If they want to use that data to help decide what ads to serve me, I have no problem with that so long as that data isn't shared with anyone else without my consent.
  - sqeaky 9y ago
    > 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.
    - Ajedi32 9y ago
      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.
      - sqeaky 9y ago
        I use GMail for similar reasons, they are reputable, but I have no expectation they won't share my data once it makes financial sense.
DanBC 9y ago
And yet everyone's up in arms if GCHQ / NSA does it.
- thomasahle 9y ago
  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.
  - briandear 9y ago
    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.
    - ionised 9y ago
      I'm curious as to where you are getting your statistics on people disappeared by the intelligence services that you can say this.
- eh78ssxv2f 9y ago
  I think "consent" is important here. GMail does it with the consent of the user.
- CamperBob2 9y ago
  Corporations didn't murder a hundred million of their own customers in the last century alone. It takes a government to do that. Consequently, governments have to be held to higher standards, not lower ones.
omarforgotpwd 9y ago
The distinction to me is: Are they building and saving some data structure that they've created based on my emails which is designed to target ads towards me, but could be used by some nefarious actor to learn a lot about my life? The spam filter (hopefully) probably doesn't store that much about me, but an ad targeting bot could be a lot more problematic.
fullshark 9y ago
Users like spam filtering, don't like ads.
morganvachon 9y ago
The problem is that it's not just your email. If you send an email to a Gmail user, Google is now building a profile on you (or was until this move) as well as your recipient. Did you give explicit consent to Google? Did you sign a EULA or SLA with them allowing this? No, they just did it anyway. Even someone who makes a point to keep themselves off of Google's radar will end up indexed and sold to the highest bidder if they send even one innocent email to a Gmail user.
- meanderer 9y ago
  Building profiles of senders can be necessary, e.g., for detecting spammer accounts. Also, email is transmitted in plain text. Sending an email is more like shouting to your friends in the street, rather than putting a letter into an envelope mailed to the recipient. Thus, I don't think an explicit consent is needed. That said, I understand that fair use of such information is a concern.
  - netheril96 9y ago
    > Also, email is transmitted in plain text. Sending an email is more like shouting to your friends in the street, rather than putting a letter into an envelope mailed to the recipient. Thus, I don't think an explicit consent is needed. These days Gmail will transfer your email protected by TLS if possible. Not shouting at all.
    - morganvachon 9y ago
      Exactly. Google seems to be of two minds about privacy. They want to show that they protect your information from the rest of the world, but they expect 100% knowledge of your information in return, so they can sell it to their advertisers. I get that that's their business model, which is why I dropped them completely in favor of paid services that don't sell my information.
late2part 9y ago
By your logic, the NSA isn't recording your calls or emails, just filing them away for classification?
real-hacker 9y ago
A frightening theory: it doesn't need to read your email anymore. It has read 10 years worth of your mail, and trained such an accurate model, that any more training data don't make much of a difference.

dingaling 9y ago

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.

cybrjoe 9y ago
It's more like your accountant preparing your tax return for free in exchange for aggregating data about your receipts and offering you goods and services you may be interested in.
- skrebbel 9y ago
  > and offering you goods and services you may be interested in. Sounds like a sleazy salesman to me.
- ouid 9y ago
  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 with profit, and the tax prep service would still exist.
  - dmix 9y ago
    > The value of this model is more than the cost of them doing your tax returns It's likely the value Google got out of scanning your email wasn't worth that much in terms of modelling profiles for ads. Probably because having both your search history and "anonymized" Google analytics, plus the sea of data that comes from owning Android is more than enough data that Google/Doubleclick needs. From a purely capitalist perspective I'd bet the utility of them scraping this data no longer outweighs the privacy costs. But at the same time Google is still scanning attachments for child porn and likely other data out of national security interests. And they still can access your data on a case-by-case basis which from a FISA perspective is a rubber-stamp away from accessing your data from 2 hops away from someone who may or may not have done something bad. I personally will not weigh using Google vs any other email service in terms of privacy any different after this measure. But I still appreciate their efforts to reduce the "standard pratice" nature of scanning private email. If I do use anything Google-related I will not associate my personal identity in any way with the service, which is still requirement for Google play. You can still use a fake gmail account and prepaid Google gift cards bought with cash to disassociate your identity from using the service. Although that's still well beyond the investment the majority of people are willing to make. Regardless privacy comes at a cost these days. Good OPSEC > trusting cloud services privacy policy. You can either not use the services or invest in protecting your data when using them. I will still cheer on Google's efforts to make those of us who care about privacy live's easier. I'm not naive enough to ignore how their business model works but that doesn't mean they always have to take the easy route and hand everything over without considering the costs - as many ISP/Telecom companies seem to do.
    - ouid 9y ago
      I disagree with you, but from the perspective that my email contains the history of every transaction I have ever made, all of the newsletters I sign up to, and, for another 3 days, ~50% of my conversations, since I do a good chunk of my communicating over gChat. Consumer preferences change over time, so google is far more interested in the thing I bought yesterday than the thing I bought 4 months ago, so being able to read my emails is still a current interest of theirs.
      - cpeterso 9y ago
        Amazon's receipt emails stopped including an itemized breakdown. Perhaps this is for customer privacy or perhaps so Google can no longer scrape Gmail users' purchase histories.
        brewdad 9y ago
        True, but seeing as I often order one thing or two at a time, the email subject line from Amazon still gives away the goods
    - mrybczyn 9y ago
      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.
      - dmix 9y ago
        > 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 firms and most government programs. If you're an activist or someone interested in keeping your internet activity private then the bar is far higher (and the targets of which are ever expanding as governments and private organizations get better at this stuff). FBI agents, or likewise in your country of residence, have plenty of forensic tools at their disposal to connect disparate identities. It takes some real time investment and requires being super careful to evade these measures. But I'm not talking about that here. I mean the average person in 2017. I've personally done the total anonymity stuff as an experiment so I know what that takes. Having studied many documents from the various global national security organizations and being fortunate to have dated a defense attorney in the past who engaged with police surveillance reports on a daily basis for their work I'm convinced that even basic privacy measures such as never using your real identity when using internet services, creating full legitimate sounding backstories (and subsequent online profiles) for your fake identity, and changing the ID you use often enough will throw off most basic surveillance measures. I'm not doing anything to get people really invested in uncovering my online identities, as most people aren't, which is what I'm talking about. The simple fact is the vast, vast majority of people reuse the same username (and passwords) across the internet and use their real name and emails everywhere. So it's really not hard to track people online from an LEO or 4chan doxxing perspective. But I'm not convinced you have to be isolated from the utility of most online (cloud) services. You just have to invest in using them intelligently to not associate your actual identity with the services. Ad companies aren't interested in deanonymizing people anyway. They are looking for low hanging fruit and there are more than enough people to fill databases who fit this profile. So I'm not that concerned about those who don't.
  - ErrantX 9y ago
    > 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 with profit, and the tax prep service would still exist. Economies of scale; the market for that data would not exist if individuals collected it themselves to sell. Hence would break down. Phrased another way; this data about 1 person is relatively valueless. (I like the rest of your example BTW; just disagree with your conclusion)
  - rconti 9y ago
    I'm sorry, I'm from Slashdot. Can you write this in the form of a car analogy?
  - tajen 9y ago
    ...Are you aware it would be quite a worthy idea, offering an accountant in exchange of business data?
  - Zhenya 9y ago
    I think this EXACT thing is what Credit Karma is doing with free tax returns: https://www.creditkarma.com/tax https://www.creditkarma.com/tax
  - md_ 9y ago
    > 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 with profit Hmm. Could you sell it on the open market? If so--if the margins for the ad-supported model like Google's are in fact as big as they appear--why isn't there a Google competitor who provides exactly the service you describe: some kind of opt-in system where they collect data (via, say, a browser extension), sell it to advertisers, and pay you a cut? One generic answer to "why does the market not offer [some seemingly reasonable thing]" is inefficiency: maybe there's some cartel system at work where all major advertisers are hoarding the revenue for themselves. But I find that pretty unconvincing, since the whole market _seems_ to be otherwise quite competitive, and with low barriers to entry. Perhaps a more likely theory is that if you were to offer a "we pay you for personal data" competitor, you'd face massive fraud--a la click fraud--in which attackers would pretend to be real users in order to get paid for searching (or whatever), and that the subsequent need for identity verification would become so burdensome as to eat away any profits. Anyway, an interesting thought exercise, but I think one can broadly conclude that either: 1. There are real obstacles to paying people the "fair" price for their data, such that the current system is in fact fairer than it appears. 2. The entire market is unfair due to a cartel or similar (though like I said, I find this fairly unconvincing). 3. This is a great idea and you're the first to have it, so you should start a company that does exactly this. ;) No?
    - slewis 9y ago
      Take a look at Basic Attention Token and the Brave browser.
      - md_ 9y ago
        Interesting. How do they protect against clickfraud, though? Paying the user seems to me (somewhat naively, because I'm not super familiar with clickfraud) to increase the incentive for abuse, since you don't have to run a malicious website to do it. One of the obvious advantages of the Gmail model seems to me to be that free email is less fungible than cash, though of course abusers resort to spamming and other practices to monetize the resource.
    - 9y ago
  - KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago
    No way that's true. The data is not worth as much as the eyeball on the ad itself.
    - ouid 9y ago
      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.
- dwighttk 9y ago
  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.
  - dgacmu 9y ago
    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 something else paperclipped to the front with a note saying "Thought you might find this interesting." (In particular, the accountant is only one who sees the information in your tax return.)
    - dwighttk 9y ago
      Unfortunately for you the accountant uses an insecure lock on the office door.
- isomorphic 9y ago
  > offering you goods and services you may be interested in The thing is: never, not even once, has Google offered me an ad with goods and services I was interested in.
  - jpeg_hero 9y ago
    ok, maybe Gmail ads have been irrelevant to you. but surely you've done a google search and been presented with interesting goods and services?!?!
    - bostik 9y ago
      Anecdata: in the past 5 years or so the number of relevant or interesting search ads Google has shown me can be counted with one hand. - If I'm searching for technical documentation, I couldn't care less about all the random consultancies or shitty-SaaS-of-the-day trash that populate the ad slot(s). - If I'm looking for technical details on a piece of malware or vulnerability research, the last thing I want to see on the page is a goddamn AV junkware full-frontal. - If I'm searching for details on some car models ... why the fk is google shoving insurance ads on my screen real estate? And so on. As far as I'm concerned, online advertising is a stripmined toxic dump. Only the shittiest swindlers and shadiest extortion artists remain.
      - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
        >- If I'm searching for details on some car models ... why the fk is google shoving insurance ads on my screen real estate? // Brand marketing. It may not work on you, but it works in general. Personally I consider myself pretty imune to marketing but when you think "who else should I check to switch my car insurance to" then that brand is going to pop up if it's been fed to your brain enough. Indeed when you're looking at a list of similar offers the one that's associated with a name you already know will seem somehow more trustsworthy, it's an insidious finagling of a brand in to your brain drip by drip. Why do they do it? It works.
    - takeda 9y ago
      The only times I clicked on those was: 1. the site was actually what I typed in the address but forgot to add .com etc 2. by accident
- gitlabuser 9y ago
  Here's a real life example. It's like Credit Karma who prepares your tax return for free, but then uses the info to help target you for ads on credit cards, loans, etc. [this is exactly happening]
- CamperBob2 9y ago
  It's more like your accountant preparing your tax return for free in exchange for aggregating data about your receipts and offering you goods and services you may be interested in. Hmm. I could actually see that working, as a spinoff of concierge services offered by companies like American Express.
- belorn 9y ago
  If its about offering me goods and services that I may be interested in, then ad blocking is a useful feature for both me and the advertiser. If I am not interested in any goods or services then no offering or aggregation is needed. On the other hand, if its about offering me good and services which other companies want me to become interested in, then we have a different deal going on.
- Markoff 9y ago
  can your accountant prepare your taxes without looking at your receipts? no. can webmail provider provide you email service without asking your emails? sure he can
EGreg 9y ago
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?
- bostik 9y ago
  > I'd rather they be relevant Corollary: if you can't show a relevant ad, HOW ABOUT NOT SHOWING AN IRRELEVANT AT ALL?
  - EGreg 9y ago
    Actually, it is not a corollary.
- watwut 9y ago
  Relevant ad is euphemism for "ad that makes you buy stuff you would happily not own otherwise". Since ads in general work (they make people buy more or different stuff) and you can not objectively evaluate whether you was influenced by ads, it is rational to avoid them. Practically, once add service knows I am women, it insist on showing me ads for menstruation cups everywhere I browse. I also find juxtaposition of baby accessories and relaxation bullshit on metal, programming or games site mood killing. When they know less about me, I actually get less weird more neutral less crappy ads.
  - rubber_duck 9y ago
    >Relevant ad is euphemism for "ad that makes you buy stuff you would happily not own otherwise". Since ads in general work (they make people buy more or different stuff) and you can not objectively evaluate whether you was influenced by ads, it is rational to avoid them. Umm - you should avoid getting information because it might influence you to buy things ? There's nothing wrong with what you said, in an ideal world ads would be just that - informing the customer about your product - and influencing their decisions with information. The psychological marketing tricks to make a thing more attractive is also a value add. Problem is it's easy to be misleading, create disinformation and it can be very profitable - that's what leads to shitty borderline fraudulent ads we have.
fserb 9y ago
if you accountant was a computer. We have to stop this madness of thinking that "John READS my diary" means the same thing as "The function fread() READS nitems objects". Those don't mean the same thing except in a metaphorical sense. It's insane.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  why does it matter? Google has access to read my email, and if they want (or are pushed to), they can single me out and then go and read them. Sure, 9/10 times it's a bot reading my emails, but there's nothing stopping them from doing it.
  - fserb 9y ago
    it matters exactly because of what you are saying. You do have protections against someone reading your email at Google. Both from a expectation of privacy, but also from a company perspective. You also do have some non-expectation of privacy (if, for example, the US government wants to read your google email, they can ask for it and they eventually will). The day someone with a brain and an opinion on Kim Kardashian at Google reads your email, there is a HUGE difference from when Google is "reading" your email for ads/spam/spelling/whatever. You don't want to blur that line being wishywashy with language. You want to know that difference. The fact that it could happen is why you need that clear separation between "machine reading" and "a person reading".
    - CaptSpify 9y ago
      > You do have protections against someone reading your email at Google. And those protections are bullshit. I have no guarantee that they are not reading my email. If a bot has access, a person has access, and people abuse their access all the time. In fact, there have been cases of googlers reading peoples email. And I'm not blurring any line, I'm stating: Gmail can, has been, and will be abused. To pretend that is not the case is, frankly, naive.
      - jsmthrowaway 9y ago
h1d 9y ago
Why try to pretend Google is nice to you? If their spam filter gathers the most relevant words and keep them stored for admins to look for the sake of tuning or whatever and maybe the admin also works in the ad department, perhaps checking on your email isn't for ad targeting. You need to give up on your content the day you started using gmail, no matter what the TOS says.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

roywiggins 9y ago

The spam filter is for my benefit, but scanning for ad keywords is designed to benefit someone else, not me.

blowski 9y ago
To play Devil's advocate, the ads benefit you because they make Gmail free.
- StreamBright 9y ago
  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)
  - ams6110 9y ago
    There are many options to pay for email, fastmail just for one. Do you use one of them?
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      Google isn't just an e-mail service, really.
      - thomasfoster96 9y ago
        But… you don’t really have to use Gmail to use most of Google’s other products, just as you don’t really have to use (actively) Google+ to use other Google products either.
        emodendroket 9y ago
        But imagine you use an Android phone, for instance. There's a whole bunch of integrated stuff that works well together that wouldn't if you had a Google account and then kept your e-mail somewhere else. It's not really a 1:1 comparison.

cookiecaper 9y ago

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/storing it off-site long-term, and it's very specific to the individuals involved. All of us who've used Gmail know how creepy it can get. Send a couple of mails about marriage and suddenly you start seeing targeted ads about engagement rings or other marriage-related things. 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". This inference is not only dubious (ethically and technically), but anyone observing your browsing while you're logged in will see these ads and may assume that you're seeing those ads because you've been searching for information on divorce, not because Google's inference is overzealous, although it may very well be. Search and replace with anything else: new credit cards/bankruptcy lawyers, research on a medical condition/ads for related medicines, etc.; the potential for creepy inference is endless, not to mention the concrete surveillance value provided to literal spies (via PRISM), nor the risk of compromise/abuse outside of the ad space. They don't have to get and process your entire mail archive; they just have to draw their inferences from Google's own inferences in your compiled taste/interest profile. That's much more serious than a throwaway analysis of whether a mail contains spammy properties or not.

luhn 9y ago
> 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.
- ksk 9y ago
  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 creative ways to use that apparatus to either cement their position in the company or to improve career prospects. This applies to lots of domains, the obvious one being the government. Once you have a drone program, you'll find that someone somewhere WILL find a way to justify its usefulness. My main problem with data collection is the permanent nature of it, where someone somewhere at some point in time, possibly when the computational costs become feasible, will come up with a seemingly innocuous use of the data that will spiral out of control. Also, is Google hack-proof? Judging by the lawsuits around the self-driving division, apparently its trivial to steal data if you're on the inside.

bradjohnson 9y ago

One requires google to build a profile and have the knowledge in order to serve you their advertisements and the other can be done almost entirely client side. The spam filter doesn't need to phone home for anything other than updating the list.

austincheney 9y ago

In the US a service provider is allowed to violate all manners of privacy for the express limitation of ensuring maintenance and system health. Spam blocking would qualify as maintenance, but advertising would not. I suspect Google violates all manners of privacy in an automated way for all manners of reasons and qualifies such in their terms and conditions.

ksk 9y ago

Does the automated nature of the permanent data collection change anything? How about an automated drone with a camera mounted on it that follows you everywhere and records every action, indefinitely, purely automated ofcource, so that an advertising company can helpfully remind you about the awesome great $6 lunch menu when you walk past McBurger at lunchtime, or about picking up some hemorrhoids cream from MediCo because a machine learning algorithm saw you scratch your butt and deduced something.

Ajedi32 9y ago
Depends. Is that drone providing me with some other useful service, or is it following me around entirely without my knowledge or consent? Gmail provides me with a free email service. They already have the full text of all my emails. If they want to use that data to help decide what ads to serve me, I have no problem with that so long as that data isn't shared with anyone else without my consent.
- sqeaky 9y ago
  > 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.
  - Ajedi32 9y ago
    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.
    - sqeaky 9y ago
      I use GMail for similar reasons, they are reputable, but I have no expectation they won't share my data once it makes financial sense.

DanBC 9y ago

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

thomasahle 9y ago
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.
- briandear 9y ago
  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.
  - ionised 9y ago
    I'm curious as to where you are getting your statistics on people disappeared by the intelligence services that you can say this.
eh78ssxv2f 9y ago
I think "consent" is important here. GMail does it with the consent of the user.
CamperBob2 9y ago
Corporations didn't murder a hundred million of their own customers in the last century alone. It takes a government to do that. Consequently, governments have to be held to higher standards, not lower ones.

omarforgotpwd 9y ago

The distinction to me is: Are they building and saving some data structure that they've created based on my emails which is designed to target ads towards me, but could be used by some nefarious actor to learn a lot about my life? The spam filter (hopefully) probably doesn't store that much about me, but an ad targeting bot could be a lot more problematic.

fullshark 9y ago

Users like spam filtering, don't like ads.

morganvachon 9y ago

The problem is that it's not just your email. If you send an email to a Gmail user, Google is now building a profile on you (or was until this move) as well as your recipient. Did you give explicit consent to Google? Did you sign a EULA or SLA with them allowing this? No, they just did it anyway. Even someone who makes a point to keep themselves off of Google's radar will end up indexed and sold to the highest bidder if they send even one innocent email to a Gmail user.

meanderer 9y ago
Building profiles of senders can be necessary, e.g., for detecting spammer accounts. Also, email is transmitted in plain text. Sending an email is more like shouting to your friends in the street, rather than putting a letter into an envelope mailed to the recipient. Thus, I don't think an explicit consent is needed. That said, I understand that fair use of such information is a concern.
- netheril96 9y ago
  > Also, email is transmitted in plain text. Sending an email is more like shouting to your friends in the street, rather than putting a letter into an envelope mailed to the recipient. Thus, I don't think an explicit consent is needed. These days Gmail will transfer your email protected by TLS if possible. Not shouting at all.
  - morganvachon 9y ago
    Exactly. Google seems to be of two minds about privacy. They want to show that they protect your information from the rest of the world, but they expect 100% knowledge of your information in return, so they can sell it to their advertisers. I get that that's their business model, which is why I dropped them completely in favor of paid services that don't sell my information.

late2part 9y ago

By your logic, the NSA isn't recording your calls or emails, just filing them away for classification?

real-hacker 9y ago

A frightening theory: it doesn't need to read your email anymore. It has read 10 years worth of your mail, and trained such an accurate model, that any more training data don't make much of a difference.