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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 proposa
by jikeo 9y ago
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.reuters.com/article/us-eu-privacy-idUSKBN14U1FL
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/10/whatsapp-facebook-google-privacy-rules-ec-european-directive https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/10/whatsapp-...
http://www.kemplittle.com/site/articles/kl_bytes/the-draft-eprivacy-regulation10-things-you-need-to-know http://www.kemplittle.com/site/articles/kl_bytes/the-draft-e...
- chicob 9y agoThat 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.
- asdfGUYasdfn 9y agoet al Facebook.
- gbacon 9y ago> Ads will continue to appear inside the free version of Gmail, as promoted messages. But instead of scanning a user’s email, the ads will now be targeted with other personal information Google already pulls from sources such as search and YouTube.
- hn_throwaway_99 9y agoExactly. 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.
- x0x0 9y agoOr they're willing to take a loss on the ads -- which frankly don't make much money -- to go after the far more lucrative corporate emailing/calendaring market. The pricing is $5/$10/$higher per user-month, so walking away from an ads business that may possibly (but I doubt it) be earning hundreds of millions to avoid a cloud over your sales process for the aforementioned multi-billion dollar business seems like a solid trade.
- mistermann 9y agoIf they want me to use gmail for corporate email they better invest some effort in some UI & usability redesign.
- monk_e_boy 9y agoand memory consumption. I'm always amazed that gmail.com uses so much memory if you leave it open for a few days.
- hedora 9y agoOr maybe they could improve IMAP availability until it is only a few orders of magnitude worse than my local ISP (or the previous one, or all the IT departments I've dealt with this millennium...)
- Spivak 9y agoHuh? I use GMail via IMAP and I can't think of any time I've had problems. Am I just not noticing them?
- LaurensBER 9y agoThey did. Your mileage might vary but for me inbox is by far the most productive way to handle my e-mail.
- tezzer 9y agoWhen you say ads don't make much money, are you talking about from business users? 2Q 2016 $19 billion of Alphabet's $21 billion in revenue came from ads, so that seems like a strange statement.
- 65827 9y agoYeah it's all inevitable and we are just powerless peons in the face of the purely efficient and all knowing machine. That's certainly the bullshit narrative Google wants you to believe.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y agoThey explain everything in the TOS you agree to when starting a free account. It's not exactly shocking that they mine your data in exchange.
- SpikeDad 9y agoAnd the 11 people out of 200 million users that read the TOS are indeed not shocked.
- hedora 9y agoGoogle tracks you even if you do not have an acccount. There is not practical way to opt out. I disagree with the TOS but we use their services at work. What am I supposed to do? Quit my job? Even with ads blocked and cookies disabled, so much JavaScript is served by them, they can infer my browsing habits anyway, and I can't count the number of times I've had to rip 8.8.8.8 out of DNS settings in the last year. How exactly does this constitute a choice to share my private information with them, and what thing that I want am I getting in exchange, exactly?
- roganp 9y agoOr, maybe: the extra information gleaned from reading your emails is just not that valuable. Not because they have this via other means, but its just not that valuable, period - whether it comes from reading emails or scrutinizing your browser history. We like to imagine that if advertisers knew enough about us, they'd be able to direct our spending, but I think that is far from true.
- piaste 9y agoI'm pretty sure scrutinizing your browser history is still extremely valuable. But I find it quite plausible that email in particular has lost value as marketing information. People still use email for all kinds of business, of course. But their day-to-day personal activities, the kind that marketers care about ("I've taken up kayaking!", "I'm pregnant!") don't usually show up in emails any more, they get posted on social media.
- gub09 9y agoThis makes sense. Possibly the value of increased corporate sales of G Suite is worth more than the loss of the information gained from reading diminishing numbers of personal emails, as people turn more and more to social media and phone apps for personal communication.
- jodrellblank 9y agoWe like to imagine that if advertisers knew enough about us, they'd be able to direct our spending. Speak for yourself, I don't like to imagine that at all.
- hedora 9y agoThe corporate profile they have on the company I work for must go into unthinkable detail. If they were announcing no tracking for work accounts across their entire suite of products, this would be a big deal. As it is, they're presumably still reading our gdocs, address books, calendars, hangouts, search histories and broswing histories, and geolocations/third party app usage for all the android users. Email data is white noise compared to this. I'd wonder how IT could be so stupid to put up with this if Microsoft hadn't also made pervasive surveillance mandatory.
- h1d 9y agoIf people worry about passing email content to Google for privacy reasons, why use gmail? Seriously.
- brianpan 9y agoI believe the concern is everyone else using gmail compromising your privacy.
- tzs 9y agoWouldn'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.
- andybak 9y agoThey 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.
- Steko 9y agoI just think the dollars aren't there: (1) email itself is fading vs text and various social media and (2) 98% of the population reads 98% of their email through the generic mail app on their phones that doesn't display Google's ads anyway.
- late2part 9y agoName one free, popular, profitable, large scale service that offers limited capacity on their offering. Very very few. You offer unlimited and you charge for increased value or you monetize with ads. Freemium is mostly dead.
- applecrazy 9y agoGoogle doesn't offer unlimited data storage. 15GB to start and more can be purchased.
- lostlogin 9y agoThe storage offering was way way less than that when everyone here signed up, though it was still vastly greater than anything anyone else offered if memory serves.
- 9y ago
- aleem 9y agoThe industry at large and Apple in particular is coming at them from the other direction preferring premium, furthering ad blockers and offering better privacy defaults (iOS 11). Elon Musk has gone so far as to allude that Google is the only AI company that worries him[1]. And so it goes. Coupled with AI and the amount of data they are able to feed into the AI engines, I am guessing this won't regress their ad targeting. They have also managed to supplant it with other avenues. Google Travel, Google Calendar and other apps have explicit permission to read your email, Google serves email images off their own servers which gives them a tracking beacon and behavioural data across cohorts. All this adds a level of indirection but still gives them access to behavioural data and user intent. [1] http://www.androidauthority.com/elon-musk-on-ai-696198/ http://www.androidauthority.com/elon-musk-on-ai-696198/
- snowman311 9y agoAgreed. The Google Ad Machine will never stop running. But, I think they will diversify their revenue streams in the coming years. Forces outside of Google's control such as governments and competition will begin to push back on the "all you can eat buffet" of personal data that Google has enjoyed in the past years. Based on the numbers in the article like doubling their "large business" user base in the past year, I think Diane Greene will lead them to generating huge revenue in the Enterprise sector. Also, I think freemium versions of Google software, directed at consumers, will be increasingly popular in the future.
- hedora 9y agoApple does seem to be paying more than lip service to privacy. Are there any other examples? Microsoft's "premium" push is actually moving toward more invasive surveillance. They've been ramping up the marketing doublespeak about their "telemetry" in the last 12 months. Maybe that is a sign they'll back off sometime soon, but so far, it's "Full steam ahead, users be damned."