5 ms·

I thought Gmail was much worse, scanning email contents etc.

sellyme 5y ago
The scanning of email contents that Gmail does is, from a privacy standpoint, indistinguishable from them simply sending you the email. Their server has to know the contents of that email either way.
- sodality2 5y ago
  >The scanning of email contents that Gmail does is, from a privacy standpoint, indistinguishable from them simply sending you the email The privacy violation of creating a profile on me based on my mail to tailor ads is not the same thing as simply delivering mail.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    That's the price of a free service. It's always been the gmail MO. Do you want to get something for nothing at all?
    - sodality2 5y ago
      Yet protonmail doesn't do that at zero cost. I also gladly do pay for email providers.
      - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        So one business offers a loss leader and every competitor has to be rebuked for not matching them?
  - sellyme 5y ago
    In both cases exactly the same entities read your email: you, the sender, and Gmail. I don't see how you could go "yeah, this is a privacy improvement" if your information is still visible to exactly the same entities, but one of them isn't really mentioning it.
    - sodality2 5y ago
      The difference is that protonmail, again, doesn't scan any data in my emails. Google does, then stores and tailors and sells ads. My privacy is violated when google scans my mail, and not when protonmail doesn't.
      - sellyme 5y ago
        I'm not sure what you're trying to get at with the word "scan" here, so hopefully this abstraction will be useful. Imagine you have a message written on a piece of paper. You intentionally show this message to two people, Alice and Bob, and are fully aware that they have both read and can perfectly remember the entire contents of the message. Now imagine that Alice thought about the message independently (not recalling it, but actually thinking new thoughts), and that Bob did not do this. Are you claiming that Alice violated your privacy by thinking about something you showed her and asked her to remember? Or perhaps would it only be a violation of privacy if she then subsequently told you one of those thoughts?
        picardythird 5y ago
        I don’t understand what you’re attempting to achieve with this. You’re weirdly abstracting about something that doesn’t need to be. People want to be able to have a private email correspondence about, for instance, dildos, and then not have to be served dildo ads outside of that context.
        sellyme 5y ago
        > I don’t understand what you’re attempting to achieve with this. I was hoping to achieve a "yes" or "no", to at least one of the two questions. I don't know what GP thinks "scan" means when describing how a computer processes text, and was hoping that an analogy to a more natural concept would allow for that to be made clear. What's the actual action being taken that's the violation? It's clearly not simply being able to read the message, but is it "thinking" about it (for lack of a better word)? That's how I interpreted the initial comment, but it seems very reactionary, so I wanted to make sure I understood it. > People want to be able to have a private email correspondence about, for instance, dildos, and then not have to be served dildo ads outside of that context. Totally fair, but that's no longer about privacy (unless your concern is someone else watching your monitor over your shoulder, in which case that person is the one breaking your privacy).

The scanning of email contents that Gmail does is, from a privacy standpoint, indistinguishable from them simply sending you the email. Their server has to know the contents of that email either way.

sodality2 5y ago
>The scanning of email contents that Gmail does is, from a privacy standpoint, indistinguishable from them simply sending you the email The privacy violation of creating a profile on me based on my mail to tailor ads is not the same thing as simply delivering mail.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  That's the price of a free service. It's always been the gmail MO. Do you want to get something for nothing at all?
  - sodality2 5y ago
    Yet protonmail doesn't do that at zero cost. I also gladly do pay for email providers.
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      So one business offers a loss leader and every competitor has to be rebuked for not matching them?
- sellyme 5y ago
  In both cases exactly the same entities read your email: you, the sender, and Gmail. I don't see how you could go "yeah, this is a privacy improvement" if your information is still visible to exactly the same entities, but one of them isn't really mentioning it.
  - sodality2 5y ago
    The difference is that protonmail, again, doesn't scan any data in my emails. Google does, then stores and tailors and sells ads. My privacy is violated when google scans my mail, and not when protonmail doesn't.
    - sellyme 5y ago
      I'm not sure what you're trying to get at with the word "scan" here, so hopefully this abstraction will be useful. Imagine you have a message written on a piece of paper. You intentionally show this message to two people, Alice and Bob, and are fully aware that they have both read and can perfectly remember the entire contents of the message. Now imagine that Alice thought about the message independently (not recalling it, but actually thinking new thoughts), and that Bob did not do this. Are you claiming that Alice violated your privacy by thinking about something you showed her and asked her to remember? Or perhaps would it only be a violation of privacy if she then subsequently told you one of those thoughts?
      - picardythird 5y ago
        I don’t understand what you’re attempting to achieve with this. You’re weirdly abstracting about something that doesn’t need to be. People want to be able to have a private email correspondence about, for instance, dildos, and then not have to be served dildo ads outside of that context.
        sellyme 5y ago
        > I don’t understand what you’re attempting to achieve with this. I was hoping to achieve a "yes" or "no", to at least one of the two questions. I don't know what GP thinks "scan" means when describing how a computer processes text, and was hoping that an analogy to a more natural concept would allow for that to be made clear. What's the actual action being taken that's the violation? It's clearly not simply being able to read the message, but is it "thinking" about it (for lack of a better word)? That's how I interpreted the initial comment, but it seems very reactionary, so I wanted to make sure I understood it. > People want to be able to have a private email correspondence about, for instance, dildos, and then not have to be served dildo ads outside of that context. Totally fair, but that's no longer about privacy (unless your concern is someone else watching your monitor over your shoulder, in which case that person is the one breaking your privacy).