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In the past. We (I worked on gmail ads during this time) stopped doing it about a year ago. https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in-the-en
by joefkelley 8y ago
In the past. We (I worked on gmail ads during this time) stopped doing it about a year ago.
https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in-the-enterprise-g-suites-gmail-and-consumer-gmail-to-more-closely-align/ https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
- bpchaps 8y agoIs any of the data used from that collection/analysis still around?
- joefkelley 8y agoNo. I mean, maybe high-level aggregate data like "X% of users got emails about shopping" might still be in some spreadsheet somewhere, or in people's brains. But no, I can't think of a way any personalized data would still be around.
- ianwalter 8y agoThats good, but something tells me I still shouldn't fully trust Google/Gmail with things like this.
- jazzyjackson 8y agoI mean instead they're just training their 'auto-reply' AI systems which they probably expect to be more valuable than advertising anyway. Every interaction you have through google gives their neural nets a little more data to predict everyone's next reply.
- markovbot 8y agoYou shouldn't trust anyone. There's nothing stopping them from doing it again, or continuing to do it and publishing that nice writeup. Of course when your data is on a 3rd party server, that 3rd party has access to it. Why do we keep pretending like anything else is the case?
- derefr 8y ago> Of course when your data is on a 3rd party server, that 3rd party has access to it. You realize that oblivious third-party storage can exist, right? For example, Tarsnap. It's the the durable-storage equivalent of end-to-end encrypted messaging. The client does all the encrypting; and the client is open-source; so you don't have to trust the third-party at all. This is a bit more challenging when you want clients to be able to operate over an index of the data, rather than just the raw data (i.e. you want them to be able to search through their stored email)—but it's fully possible to architect a service such that all indexing happens on the client (perhaps distributed between many connected clients in the case of a shared data-source like a Slack workspace), where the backend is just obliviously storing and returning E2E-encrypted copies of generated index chunks, in the same way it obliviously stores and returns E2E-encrypted copies of the data itself.
- joefkelley 8y agoHonestly, that's fair. In my experience Google does a lot toward being trustworthy since it's in their long-term best interest. But at the end of the day I'm just some random guy on HN comments, so you're right to be skeptical.
- davchana 8y agoNow I get ads in gmail relevant to what I search on google.com
- wodenokoto 8y agoWhat is the monetisation scheme of Gmail now? Just a free enticement to buy the G-suite?
- jazzyjackson 8y agoGoing by the uncanny-valley accuracy of their suggested auto-replies, they're training their natural language neural nets with every message sent over their wires.
- soared 8y agoThey still have ads for the free version, just not based on your emails.
- hotpotjunkie 8y agoYeah, we believe you. wink wink nudge nudge.