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Do they "no longer scan Gmail for advertising", or do they no longer scan Gmail?
by fortythirteen 9y ago
Do they "no longer scan Gmail for advertising", or do they no longer scan Gmail?
- icebraining 9y agoI'm sure they scan it, otherwise it'd be hard to catch spam. I don't think they ever said they scanned it for any other reason.
- DerfNet 9y agoThey explicitly used to scan emails for advertising purposes: http://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-reading-personal-emails-privacy http://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-reading-personal-email...
- icebraining 9y agoHence any other reason. Advertising was the reason already in discussion.
- mseebach 9y agoThey'll have to scan it for search. And spam, as sibling comment mentions. And, really, to store and display it at all, depending on your definition of 'scan'.
- fortythirteen 9y agoMy point being that "advertising" is a very limited use case. There's nothing necessarily stopping them from selling your scanned, very personal information to anyone.
- icebraining 9y agoTheir privacy policy is very clear that they don't share personal information, with four exception, none of which include selling it. So, if you trust them, they don't.
- eridius 9y ago"Scan" means they take the data out of the "email" silo and use it for purposes other than providing email services to the user (such as using it for advertising). Searching is not "scanning". Nor is any other normal behavior of providing email services. So the question at this point is does Google keep your email data silo'd or do they use it for other purposes?
- robotresearcher 9y ago> Searching is not "scanning" Pray, how does it work, then?
- eridius 9y agoDon't be pedantic. Defining "scanning" as "anything that looks at the bits on disk" makes the word meaningless in this context, because then yes, Google must absolutely "scan" it to provide basic functionality, and heck every service everywhere must "scan" their data to provide basic functionality. But that's not useful to talk about.
- bharath28 9y agoClearly Google Now/Home uses gmail data to be relevant.