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The blatant disregard for privacy is what bothers me the most. Like when I started getting push notifications from Android for my credit card payment with my e

The blatant disregard for privacy is what bothers me the most. Like when I started getting push notifications from Android for my credit card payment with my exact balance due, which they could only have gathered by parsing my emails from the bank. It's easy to resolve that by changing the contact info/settings with the bank, but just the fact that engineers at Google thought users would appreciate having their private financial information parsed and stored by Google services is absurd. It should never have crossed anyone's mind to even do that, let alone advertise it as a feature.

themacguffinman 7y ago
I'm a user. I appreciate it. It's puzzling that you think it's such a deeply unpopular feature. Third party bill reminders isn't a taboo or unexplored territory.
- holy_city 7y ago
  I don't think it's a deeply unpopular feature, I think it's deeply unethical the way it was presented to me as a user. And it's not the reminder that bothers me. It's that I don't trust Google not to share the data they extract from my private communications. Financial information in particular can be used against you by a number of parties, and it's been used to discriminate against people in the past. When it comes to the collection of that data by scanning private communications, the ethical alarm bells should have been ringing, and the fact they collect that data should be disclosed and be opt-in (or opt-out). If it's a matter of "if you don't pay for the product you are the product" that's not true - I did pay a lot of money for their product (I own a Pixel device), and if they offered an email product that I could pay for with the solace that it wouldn't be reading my emails, I would.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
    > deeply unethical the way it was presented to me as a user How was it presented to you in a way that you found deeply unethical? As I understand it shows up as a soft notification on your phone.
    - mirkules 7y ago
      It is unethical, or at the very least, unsettling the way it is presented. I am actually in awe at how many folks - especially HN folks - are ok with this. Years ago, I looked at my Google dashboard. They knew when i filed for taxes, how much was owed/reimbursed, my medical history. NONE of which I consented to Google using. Google is constantly eroding the expectation of privacy we have wrt to our emails (and probably other things that are expected to stay private, if you are on android), and this bothers me on a fundamental level. And additionally, we have constructed a world for ourselves such that not using these services to not expose private information is practically not an option anymore. I am a mixture of shocked and saddened that the HN crowd (at least so far, hudging from the comments) thinks it is a-OK for this to happen.
      - gowld 7y ago
        Some people appreciate the convenience of an automated valet, and use opsec to have their sensitive conversations on secure channels. It's not any more secure to store all your data on a webmail server that doesn't provide the Assistant stuff -- they can still leak or sell that data.
      - nybble41 7y ago
        > NONE of which I consented to Google using. And that is where you are wrong. You DID consent to this use of the information in your email when you signed up with Google as your email provider. They don't exactly make any secret of the fact that the emails in your account will be data-mined, both for the various assistant features they offer and for their own business purposes, including marketing. It is not Google's fault that you failed to consider the obvious implications of that consent. > And additionally, we have constructed a world for ourselves such that not using these services to not expose private information is practically not an option anymore. You have plenty of options. There are email providers other than Google, and means of communication other than email. Encryption is also widely available for those motivated enough to use it.
        notI 7y ago
        > You DID consent to this use of the information in your email when you signed up with Google as your email provider. No, I (not the original poster) didn't. I signed up with a Gmail account years before any of this existed, and I never would have guessed they would do what the original poster is concerned about. At no point was I informed that this type of stuff would start happening. I figured it out by reading a lot of tech news that the average person does not. As such, I've moved away from Gmail, but there are probably millions of people who aren't OK with it, but don't know it's happening.
  - TulliusCicero 7y ago
    > I don't think it's a deeply unpopular feature And yet > just the fact that engineers at Google thought users would appreciate having their private financial information parsed and stored by Google services is absurd. > It should never have crossed anyone's mind to even do that, let alone advertise it as a feature. That was an awfully quick turnaround from "I can't believe anyone would ever think this would be useful" to "I don't think it's unpopular". Almost like your initial position was absurd on its face, so once challenged you had to immediately back up to a softer, more defensible one.
    - holy_city 7y ago
      Apologies for poorly wording things. My point wasn't on the feature, but the culture that allowed the feature to be created. That's why I started by saying the disregard for privacy troubles me, and provided an example of a feature that was created out of that disregard, in my opinion. Maybe I shouldn't have said it's absurd that they would find people liking the feature, but that it's absurd they consider it ethical to scrape private financial information and then present it as a nifty notification, and even more absurd that users don't see an issue with it.
      - TulliusCicero 7y ago
        Even many people who are aware of what's going on, who are having the thing done to them, are fine with it, which is a pretty good argument against, "I can't believe anyone would think this is ethical". Apparently a large portion of the target demographic thinks it is, indeed, ethical. > even more absurd that users don't see an issue with it I don't see it as absurd, for the same reasons I've elaborated on elsewhere in the thread: the benefits are concrete and current, while the harms are nebulous/potential/abstract.
joshuamorton 7y ago
> but just the fact that engineers at Google thought users would appreciate having their private financial information parsed and stored by Google services is absurd. Counterpoint: I find this feature super useful. (and I know a lot of other people who do as well).
TulliusCicero 7y ago
Honestly I love stuff like this. Going into Google Maps and seeing my Airbnb marked out, including dates, or where my train is departing and when, that's dope. I'm guessing the multiple people telling you they think the feature is useful won't change your mind about "nobody could possibly want this", though.
kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
> which they could only have gathered by parsing my emails from the bank. You say it as if it's a revelation or discovery, when Google is very upfront about surfacing relevant information and reminders based on your inbox. On more than one occasion, this feature has helped me take actions on pending work items like payments, renewals and so on. You don't want Google to show you ads, fair enough. You don't want Google to surface for you (and only you) useful information that helps you organize your life. It almost sounds like you just want Google to give you hundreds of dollars of compute, storage and service out of the goodness of their hearts. I think both you and Google would be better off without each other.
- blub 7y ago
  Frankly, I'd reverse the question: why are you surprised that people are surprised? You think everybody has time to read the dozens of pages of legalese in Google's privacy policy, which anyway doesn't actually specify in which ways they abuse one's information? It also sounds like you need to organise your life a bit better. Google's notorious for their screw-ups and service closures, one day you might miss an important payment because they turned off the feature or you end up on the wrong side of an A/B test.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
    "why are you surprised that people are surprised?" It'd be surprising if there wasn't a clear or direct causal path about how Google found that information. For example, imagine that you paid for a hotel room somewhere in Thailand by cash, didn't carry your phone with you at the time, didn't log in to any electronic device, and still Google inferred that you stayed there, THAT would be surprising. On the other hand, literally parsing out an email (AND even linking to it, you can click on the notifs to take you to the relevant email!!!) and showing you the result doesn't in any sense qualify as surprising.
    - darkwater 7y ago
      It wouldn't be "surprising" if the mail parsing were done 100% client side, with a 100% certainty that no data is gonna be sent back to the mothership. But since it's done 100% server side I cannot honestly know what they are going to do with that data and knowledge.
username223 7y ago
> push notifications from Android for my credit card payment with my exact balance due Or "you have been served with a summons to appear at... See transportation options" (beta soon?). When a company has so completely lost sight of what its customers see as creepy that it advertises creepiness as a feature, it has lost its way.
joefkelley 7y ago
Wait, so you trust them to store the email, and parse it for something like spam detection, but not for some smarter feature? What specifically are you concerned about that is a problem with this and not with them having the email in the first place? Sounds like you shouldn't be using Gmail at all tbh.
- afiori 7y ago
  > What specifically are you concerned about that is a problem with this and not with them having the email in the first place? That they use millions of computing-dollars to extract this information and store it. Supposedly spam detection does not need to understand the numbers in your bank emails. Supposedly it needs mostly information about you previous contacts and spammy patterns from the rest of the internet. The point being that you cannot misuse the information you do not have. Google is very good at thinking of a lot of this kind of quality of life functionality, they do not seem to realize how creepy and disconcerting they can be.
  - afiori 7y ago
    Actually I want to make a slightly different point. The problem is that "intelligent" systems are unpredictable. In the future google could wrongly decide that your business is inconvenient blacklist you from searches. Maybe it got that idea from your name being mentioned in relation to some extreme stuff and unified you with ISIS.
  - esoterica 7y ago
    Computers cannot “understand” anything. You are inappropriately anthropomorphizing an algorithm. There is no epistemological difference between spam filtering and credit card statement parsing. Either way it’s just a cpu pushing around ones and zeroes.
    - afiori 7y ago
      Yes there is, whatever information google extract form an email during spam detection need not be associated with your profile. That is not the case for financial data. > Either way it’s just a cpu pushing around ones and zeroes. What is even this supposed to mean? also the information "kill on sight" on your profile of a terrorist association is just one bit, do not worry about that. The fact that they are digital does not mean that the data won't affect your life nor that human or machine will take complex decision based on them.

themacguffinman 7y ago

I'm a user. I appreciate it. It's puzzling that you think it's such a deeply unpopular feature. Third party bill reminders isn't a taboo or unexplored territory.

holy_city 7y ago
I don't think it's a deeply unpopular feature, I think it's deeply unethical the way it was presented to me as a user. And it's not the reminder that bothers me. It's that I don't trust Google not to share the data they extract from my private communications. Financial information in particular can be used against you by a number of parties, and it's been used to discriminate against people in the past. When it comes to the collection of that data by scanning private communications, the ethical alarm bells should have been ringing, and the fact they collect that data should be disclosed and be opt-in (or opt-out). If it's a matter of "if you don't pay for the product you are the product" that's not true - I did pay a lot of money for their product (I own a Pixel device), and if they offered an email product that I could pay for with the solace that it wouldn't be reading my emails, I would.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
  > deeply unethical the way it was presented to me as a user How was it presented to you in a way that you found deeply unethical? As I understand it shows up as a soft notification on your phone.
  - mirkules 7y ago
    It is unethical, or at the very least, unsettling the way it is presented. I am actually in awe at how many folks - especially HN folks - are ok with this. Years ago, I looked at my Google dashboard. They knew when i filed for taxes, how much was owed/reimbursed, my medical history. NONE of which I consented to Google using. Google is constantly eroding the expectation of privacy we have wrt to our emails (and probably other things that are expected to stay private, if you are on android), and this bothers me on a fundamental level. And additionally, we have constructed a world for ourselves such that not using these services to not expose private information is practically not an option anymore. I am a mixture of shocked and saddened that the HN crowd (at least so far, hudging from the comments) thinks it is a-OK for this to happen.
    - gowld 7y ago
      Some people appreciate the convenience of an automated valet, and use opsec to have their sensitive conversations on secure channels. It's not any more secure to store all your data on a webmail server that doesn't provide the Assistant stuff -- they can still leak or sell that data.
    - nybble41 7y ago
      > NONE of which I consented to Google using. And that is where you are wrong. You DID consent to this use of the information in your email when you signed up with Google as your email provider. They don't exactly make any secret of the fact that the emails in your account will be data-mined, both for the various assistant features they offer and for their own business purposes, including marketing. It is not Google's fault that you failed to consider the obvious implications of that consent. > And additionally, we have constructed a world for ourselves such that not using these services to not expose private information is practically not an option anymore. You have plenty of options. There are email providers other than Google, and means of communication other than email. Encryption is also widely available for those motivated enough to use it.
      - notI 7y ago
        > You DID consent to this use of the information in your email when you signed up with Google as your email provider. No, I (not the original poster) didn't. I signed up with a Gmail account years before any of this existed, and I never would have guessed they would do what the original poster is concerned about. At no point was I informed that this type of stuff would start happening. I figured it out by reading a lot of tech news that the average person does not. As such, I've moved away from Gmail, but there are probably millions of people who aren't OK with it, but don't know it's happening.
- TulliusCicero 7y ago
  > I don't think it's a deeply unpopular feature And yet > just the fact that engineers at Google thought users would appreciate having their private financial information parsed and stored by Google services is absurd. > It should never have crossed anyone's mind to even do that, let alone advertise it as a feature. That was an awfully quick turnaround from "I can't believe anyone would ever think this would be useful" to "I don't think it's unpopular". Almost like your initial position was absurd on its face, so once challenged you had to immediately back up to a softer, more defensible one.
  - holy_city 7y ago
    Apologies for poorly wording things. My point wasn't on the feature, but the culture that allowed the feature to be created. That's why I started by saying the disregard for privacy troubles me, and provided an example of a feature that was created out of that disregard, in my opinion. Maybe I shouldn't have said it's absurd that they would find people liking the feature, but that it's absurd they consider it ethical to scrape private financial information and then present it as a nifty notification, and even more absurd that users don't see an issue with it.
    - TulliusCicero 7y ago
      Even many people who are aware of what's going on, who are having the thing done to them, are fine with it, which is a pretty good argument against, "I can't believe anyone would think this is ethical". Apparently a large portion of the target demographic thinks it is, indeed, ethical. > even more absurd that users don't see an issue with it I don't see it as absurd, for the same reasons I've elaborated on elsewhere in the thread: the benefits are concrete and current, while the harms are nebulous/potential/abstract.

joshuamorton 7y ago

> but just the fact that engineers at Google thought users would appreciate having their private financial information parsed and stored by Google services is absurd. Counterpoint: I find this feature super useful. (and I know a lot of other people who do as well).

TulliusCicero 7y ago

Honestly I love stuff like this. Going into Google Maps and seeing my Airbnb marked out, including dates, or where my train is departing and when, that's dope. I'm guessing the multiple people telling you they think the feature is useful won't change your mind about "nobody could possibly want this", though.

kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago

> which they could only have gathered by parsing my emails from the bank. You say it as if it's a revelation or discovery, when Google is very upfront about surfacing relevant information and reminders based on your inbox. On more than one occasion, this feature has helped me take actions on pending work items like payments, renewals and so on. You don't want Google to show you ads, fair enough. You don't want Google to surface for you (and only you) useful information that helps you organize your life. It almost sounds like you just want Google to give you hundreds of dollars of compute, storage and service out of the goodness of their hearts. I think both you and Google would be better off without each other.

blub 7y ago
Frankly, I'd reverse the question: why are you surprised that people are surprised? You think everybody has time to read the dozens of pages of legalese in Google's privacy policy, which anyway doesn't actually specify in which ways they abuse one's information? It also sounds like you need to organise your life a bit better. Google's notorious for their screw-ups and service closures, one day you might miss an important payment because they turned off the feature or you end up on the wrong side of an A/B test.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
  "why are you surprised that people are surprised?" It'd be surprising if there wasn't a clear or direct causal path about how Google found that information. For example, imagine that you paid for a hotel room somewhere in Thailand by cash, didn't carry your phone with you at the time, didn't log in to any electronic device, and still Google inferred that you stayed there, THAT would be surprising. On the other hand, literally parsing out an email (AND even linking to it, you can click on the notifs to take you to the relevant email!!!) and showing you the result doesn't in any sense qualify as surprising.
  - darkwater 7y ago
    It wouldn't be "surprising" if the mail parsing were done 100% client side, with a 100% certainty that no data is gonna be sent back to the mothership. But since it's done 100% server side I cannot honestly know what they are going to do with that data and knowledge.

username223 7y ago

> push notifications from Android for my credit card payment with my exact balance due Or "you have been served with a summons to appear at... See transportation options" (beta soon?). When a company has so completely lost sight of what its customers see as creepy that it advertises creepiness as a feature, it has lost its way.

joefkelley 7y ago

Wait, so you trust them to store the email, and parse it for something like spam detection, but not for some smarter feature? What specifically are you concerned about that is a problem with this and not with them having the email in the first place? Sounds like you shouldn't be using Gmail at all tbh.

afiori 7y ago
> What specifically are you concerned about that is a problem with this and not with them having the email in the first place? That they use millions of computing-dollars to extract this information and store it. Supposedly spam detection does not need to understand the numbers in your bank emails. Supposedly it needs mostly information about you previous contacts and spammy patterns from the rest of the internet. The point being that you cannot misuse the information you do not have. Google is very good at thinking of a lot of this kind of quality of life functionality, they do not seem to realize how creepy and disconcerting they can be.
- afiori 7y ago
  Actually I want to make a slightly different point. The problem is that "intelligent" systems are unpredictable. In the future google could wrongly decide that your business is inconvenient blacklist you from searches. Maybe it got that idea from your name being mentioned in relation to some extreme stuff and unified you with ISIS.
- esoterica 7y ago
  Computers cannot “understand” anything. You are inappropriately anthropomorphizing an algorithm. There is no epistemological difference between spam filtering and credit card statement parsing. Either way it’s just a cpu pushing around ones and zeroes.
  - afiori 7y ago
    Yes there is, whatever information google extract form an email during spam detection need not be associated with your profile. That is not the case for financial data. > Either way it’s just a cpu pushing around ones and zeroes. What is even this supposed to mean? also the information "kill on sight" on your profile of a terrorist association is just one bit, do not worry about that. The fact that they are digital does not mean that the data won't affect your life nor that human or machine will take complex decision based on them.