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So why exactly are people suddenly up in arms about this? How's it different from opening up your android phone and using google's spellcheck, with algorithms

So why exactly are people suddenly up in arms about this? How's it different from opening up your android phone and using google's spellcheck, with algorithms that predict your next word when you're typing? Never seen such atrociously negative comments to what's essentially a cool feature you can disable. PS: How many of the outraged people here are actually voting with their wallet and paying for something like Fastmail? (https://www.fastmail.com https://www.fastmail.com)

peatmoss 9y ago
I'm a paying Fastmail user. I switched over after they (EDIT: Gmail) started announcing compatibility-breaking features. Processing my emails to suggest content is one of a litany of reasons that I'm glad to have switched my email to Fastmail. In this particular case, I think people are (probably rightly) concerned about how the machine learning models here are used to suggest content. I would guess that most of the people who are unconcerned with the Android keyboard's privacy model either haven't thought too much about it, or have come to accept it in small increments.
dmazin 9y ago
Two big problems. One, AI mediation of language sees issues like bias amplification (AI learns our biases then suggests them back to us). Google itself wrote about this recently [1]. Two, spell check has a homogenizing effect on spelling [2]. If you extend this to the level of phrases, that will homogenize not just spelling but the very way we talk. [1] https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/text-embedding-models-contain-bias.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/text-embedding-mod... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references
- peatmoss 9y ago
  To add a third, I have a problem with my personal emails being used as a corpus of text to train these models. Maybe they're using only my emails to train a model for me, and turning that feature off disables them doing so. Maybe they're using everyone's email to train a generic model. Of course, they've been (machine) reading your emails to provide ads since forever, so in that sense maybe this isn't really that new. That said, many people habituated to email reading for ads back when Google's brand image was riding higher.
  - dmazin 9y ago
    Yup, I forgot where I read this, but I believe all Gmails are eligible for the model. Again, forgot where I saw this, but Google takes great precaution to protect your data from human inspection, but being used in the corpus is fair game.
    - peatmoss 9y ago
      I think if you are a (paid?) enterprise user, they do not do this. On the other hand, sussing out what is and is not fair game is quite a lot easier with a service such as Fastmail.
      - scrollaway 9y ago
        Doesn't have to be "enterprise". Anyone can pay $5/mo for GSuite (https://gsuite.google.com https://gsuite.google.com), which includes gmail and a ton of other tools. Furthermore, it's on your own domain rather than @gmail.com, which is not only better (you truly own the email address), it's also a hell of a lot more professional and makes it easier to migrate to other services if you wish to. To put it bluntly, if anyone here is complaining and has an @gmail.com address, email me and I'll be happy to help you buy your own domain and create MX records to either gsuite or fastmail. But I just can't hear the empty negativity anymore from consumers who say "no! bad google!", yet, by using the free product, keep making their emails available for the AI models and keep signaling to Google that an advertising business model works better than a paid-per-user one.
        peatmoss 9y ago
        That's a generous offer, and one that I'd echo. If anyone is unsure where to start, or wants some advice, I'll be glad to help you with domain registration and email hosting MX record setup.
        Bucephalus355 9y ago
        Why can’t I buy gmail and just use regular @gmail? Would love all the features of GSuite, but a custom domain name I would pay even more to avoid. Unless you’re running a business, it looks bizarre. For some in the development industry / those who write technical blogs I can imagine that being useful at times, but still......
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
I pay for FastMail. Voted with my wallet two years ago. If I get any impression someone is writing me messages with this feature, I'll filter them into my trash. I want to speak to people, not Google.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  I got news for you, a large chunk of the HN userbase is on mobile and has been using predictive keyboard input for years. A large chunk of people on the internet, in fact. You're speaking to robots right now.
  - musage 9y ago
    It shows.
- astura 9y ago
  >If I get any impression someone is writing me messages with this feature, I'll filter them into my trash. I want to speak to people, not Google. This seems like an extreme overreaction and quite antisocial.
  - typomatic 9y ago
    Sending me robot-generated messages is quite antisocial!
    - joshuamorton 9y ago
      See scrollaway's response above. A lot of the text you already read is robot-generated. More than half the words in this comment were generated via autocorrect or auto complete in some fashion. It's still useful and thoughtful though.
      - typomatic 9y ago
        > A lot of the text you already read is robot-generated. More than half the words in this comment were generated via autocorrect or auto complete in some fashion. It's still useful and thoughtful though. Just to be clear, I don't find these things reassuring, it just makes me think you don't care about communicating very much. Please accept that some people find machine-generated communication to be gross and don't want to be subjected to it, whether or not you understand.
_bxg1 9y ago
At this point the only reason I haven't ditched Gmail is because that's the email address I've used everywhere. Changing email addresses is even more problematic than changing physical addresses these days. The reason people are so upset is that it has a negative effect on the world even if people have the option to turn it off (and don't), and it has virtually no real benefit. It's the latest in the trend of tech companies trying to solve problems that don't exist, and creating new ones in the process. At best, you'll never know if the person on the other end of the line outsourced their response to Google. At worst, people's mental capacity for expression and nuance will start to atrophy because they couldn't be bothered to manually relate to another human being.
- peatmoss 9y ago
  I've recommended it elsewhere in similar threads, but a nice middle ground between self-hosted email (lots of work), and a straight-up Gmail/Yahoo/Fastmail/Hotmail/Etc account is to buy your own domain and set up your MX records in accordance with Fastmail's (or whoever's) instructions. I've ported my email address / domain across several hosting providers now. I don't have to retrain anyone. Obviously this doesn't help you now, but maybe you can start training people on to your new brundolf@superfancydomain.org email address to avoid this problem in the hypothetical future when Fastmail becomes dystopian and gross.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    The best time to start using your own domain for email was 10 years ago. The second best time is today.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Get your own domain, set up an email forwarder on it that points to your Gmail, and start shifting your contacts and accounts over to it. Then if down the road, you decide you want to switch, most of the work will already be done. I spent about 18 months on Gmail using my own domain before I switched to FastMail, and it made the transition much less painful.
brlewis 9y ago
I think HNers are overestimating the amount of thought people put into composing emails absent this feature.
Invictus0 9y ago
How many times does it take for people to understand that incremental "cool" features are exactly what leads to a dystopian future? Facebook added one cool feature after another until suddenly people realized that Facebook knew everything about you; only then were people alarmed. This is so obviously, blatantly terrible it's beyond belief that anyone could be in support of this. It's literally bending the way you think to fit more closely into a form field, rounding out the edges on human interaction. Do you really think that most people will take the additional time to write out their real thoughts, or just go with the autogenerated approximation? Just wait until you start typing "can you go to the supermarket and pick up" and the thing suggests Doritos, because that's exactly where this is going.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  Are you seriously not seeing the difference between [human] giving information to [company], versus [company] making a suggestion to [human]? I never liked Facebook; I never thought any of Facebook's cool features made up for their creepy business model. I do like Google and Google Mail because I pay for the service and the relationship is extremely different. But that's outside the point anyway. You're giving information to the company by simply using gmail (receiving and sending emails through gmail). Autocomplete is a feature that doesn't gather information (at best a yes/no)... Seriously, wtf is dystopian about autocomplete? Do you write your code in nano or something? And how much thought do you put into an email anyway? Outside of development ones, all my emails are extremely standard (the few times I even bother sending any). I won't use this for development emails. What is the problem?
fabatka 9y ago
I never understood the need for autocorrect or even spellchecking if I'm not writing a report or anything official. Am I a luddite for thinking that there are a lot of technologies that provide very superficial improvements to our lives while opening the possibility for serious problems (see other comment on parent about incremental changes that may be not harmful by themselves)?
- scrollaway 9y ago
  A report, anything official, anything professional, or really anywhere you don't want to appear to make typos left and right. Furthermore, if you're dyslexic, autocorrect is essentially assistive technology. Now, do I need autocorrect when I'm texting my mom? No, I don't, but that doesn't mean I want to be turning it on/off every time I switch context. What harm does it do by staying on? Hide my true nature as a poor speller? I'll let you in on a secret: My handwriting looks like shit. Digital text has allowed me, for the past two decades, to hide my true nature as a shitty handwriter.

peatmoss 9y ago

I'm a paying Fastmail user. I switched over after they (EDIT: Gmail) started announcing compatibility-breaking features. Processing my emails to suggest content is one of a litany of reasons that I'm glad to have switched my email to Fastmail. In this particular case, I think people are (probably rightly) concerned about how the machine learning models here are used to suggest content. I would guess that most of the people who are unconcerned with the Android keyboard's privacy model either haven't thought too much about it, or have come to accept it in small increments.

dmazin 9y ago

Two big problems. One, AI mediation of language sees issues like bias amplification (AI learns our biases then suggests them back to us). Google itself wrote about this recently [1]. Two, spell check has a homogenizing effect on spelling [2]. If you extend this to the level of phrases, that will homogenize not just spelling but the very way we talk. [1] https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/text-embedding-models-contain-bias.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/text-embedding-mod... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references

peatmoss 9y ago
To add a third, I have a problem with my personal emails being used as a corpus of text to train these models. Maybe they're using only my emails to train a model for me, and turning that feature off disables them doing so. Maybe they're using everyone's email to train a generic model. Of course, they've been (machine) reading your emails to provide ads since forever, so in that sense maybe this isn't really that new. That said, many people habituated to email reading for ads back when Google's brand image was riding higher.
- dmazin 9y ago
  Yup, I forgot where I read this, but I believe all Gmails are eligible for the model. Again, forgot where I saw this, but Google takes great precaution to protect your data from human inspection, but being used in the corpus is fair game.
  - peatmoss 9y ago
    I think if you are a (paid?) enterprise user, they do not do this. On the other hand, sussing out what is and is not fair game is quite a lot easier with a service such as Fastmail.
    - scrollaway 9y ago
      Doesn't have to be "enterprise". Anyone can pay $5/mo for GSuite (https://gsuite.google.com https://gsuite.google.com), which includes gmail and a ton of other tools. Furthermore, it's on your own domain rather than @gmail.com, which is not only better (you truly own the email address), it's also a hell of a lot more professional and makes it easier to migrate to other services if you wish to. To put it bluntly, if anyone here is complaining and has an @gmail.com address, email me and I'll be happy to help you buy your own domain and create MX records to either gsuite or fastmail. But I just can't hear the empty negativity anymore from consumers who say "no! bad google!", yet, by using the free product, keep making their emails available for the AI models and keep signaling to Google that an advertising business model works better than a paid-per-user one.
      - peatmoss 9y ago
        That's a generous offer, and one that I'd echo. If anyone is unsure where to start, or wants some advice, I'll be glad to help you with domain registration and email hosting MX record setup.
      - Bucephalus355 9y ago
        Why can’t I buy gmail and just use regular @gmail? Would love all the features of GSuite, but a custom domain name I would pay even more to avoid. Unless you’re running a business, it looks bizarre. For some in the development industry / those who write technical blogs I can imagine that being useful at times, but still......

ocdtrekkie 9y ago

I pay for FastMail. Voted with my wallet two years ago. If I get any impression someone is writing me messages with this feature, I'll filter them into my trash. I want to speak to people, not Google.

scrollaway 9y ago
I got news for you, a large chunk of the HN userbase is on mobile and has been using predictive keyboard input for years. A large chunk of people on the internet, in fact. You're speaking to robots right now.
- musage 9y ago
  It shows.
astura 9y ago
>If I get any impression someone is writing me messages with this feature, I'll filter them into my trash. I want to speak to people, not Google. This seems like an extreme overreaction and quite antisocial.
- typomatic 9y ago
  Sending me robot-generated messages is quite antisocial!
  - joshuamorton 9y ago
    See scrollaway's response above. A lot of the text you already read is robot-generated. More than half the words in this comment were generated via autocorrect or auto complete in some fashion. It's still useful and thoughtful though.
    - typomatic 9y ago
      > A lot of the text you already read is robot-generated. More than half the words in this comment were generated via autocorrect or auto complete in some fashion. It's still useful and thoughtful though. Just to be clear, I don't find these things reassuring, it just makes me think you don't care about communicating very much. Please accept that some people find machine-generated communication to be gross and don't want to be subjected to it, whether or not you understand.

_bxg1 9y ago

At this point the only reason I haven't ditched Gmail is because that's the email address I've used everywhere. Changing email addresses is even more problematic than changing physical addresses these days. The reason people are so upset is that it has a negative effect on the world even if people have the option to turn it off (and don't), and it has virtually no real benefit. It's the latest in the trend of tech companies trying to solve problems that don't exist, and creating new ones in the process. At best, you'll never know if the person on the other end of the line outsourced their response to Google. At worst, people's mental capacity for expression and nuance will start to atrophy because they couldn't be bothered to manually relate to another human being.

peatmoss 9y ago
I've recommended it elsewhere in similar threads, but a nice middle ground between self-hosted email (lots of work), and a straight-up Gmail/Yahoo/Fastmail/Hotmail/Etc account is to buy your own domain and set up your MX records in accordance with Fastmail's (or whoever's) instructions. I've ported my email address / domain across several hosting providers now. I don't have to retrain anyone. Obviously this doesn't help you now, but maybe you can start training people on to your new brundolf@superfancydomain.org email address to avoid this problem in the hypothetical future when Fastmail becomes dystopian and gross.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  The best time to start using your own domain for email was 10 years ago. The second best time is today.
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Get your own domain, set up an email forwarder on it that points to your Gmail, and start shifting your contacts and accounts over to it. Then if down the road, you decide you want to switch, most of the work will already be done. I spent about 18 months on Gmail using my own domain before I switched to FastMail, and it made the transition much less painful.

brlewis 9y ago

I think HNers are overestimating the amount of thought people put into composing emails absent this feature.

Invictus0 9y ago

How many times does it take for people to understand that incremental "cool" features are exactly what leads to a dystopian future? Facebook added one cool feature after another until suddenly people realized that Facebook knew everything about you; only then were people alarmed. This is so obviously, blatantly terrible it's beyond belief that anyone could be in support of this. It's literally bending the way you think to fit more closely into a form field, rounding out the edges on human interaction. Do you really think that most people will take the additional time to write out their real thoughts, or just go with the autogenerated approximation? Just wait until you start typing "can you go to the supermarket and pick up" and the thing suggests Doritos, because that's exactly where this is going.

scrollaway 9y ago
Are you seriously not seeing the difference between [human] giving information to [company], versus [company] making a suggestion to [human]? I never liked Facebook; I never thought any of Facebook's cool features made up for their creepy business model. I do like Google and Google Mail because I pay for the service and the relationship is extremely different. But that's outside the point anyway. You're giving information to the company by simply using gmail (receiving and sending emails through gmail). Autocomplete is a feature that doesn't gather information (at best a yes/no)... Seriously, wtf is dystopian about autocomplete? Do you write your code in nano or something? And how much thought do you put into an email anyway? Outside of development ones, all my emails are extremely standard (the few times I even bother sending any). I won't use this for development emails. What is the problem?

fabatka 9y ago

I never understood the need for autocorrect or even spellchecking if I'm not writing a report or anything official. Am I a luddite for thinking that there are a lot of technologies that provide very superficial improvements to our lives while opening the possibility for serious problems (see other comment on parent about incremental changes that may be not harmful by themselves)?

scrollaway 9y ago
A report, anything official, anything professional, or really anywhere you don't want to appear to make typos left and right. Furthermore, if you're dyslexic, autocorrect is essentially assistive technology. Now, do I need autocorrect when I'm texting my mom? No, I don't, but that doesn't mean I want to be turning it on/off every time I switch context. What harm does it do by staying on? Hide my true nature as a poor speller? I'll let you in on a secret: My handwriting looks like shit. Digital text has allowed me, for the past two decades, to hide my true nature as a shitty handwriter.