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>The scanning of email contents that Gmail does is, from a privacy standpoint, indistinguishable from them simply sending you the email The privacy violation o

>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).
        5y ago
- kaba0 5y ago
  You don’t see the difference between “seeing an email” en transit vs training a ML algorithm on it and extracting values like when will your airplane depart, when is your vacation, etc and automatically propagating that to other google products? I mean, it sure is comfortable, but you can sure as hell know that they build an extensive profile out of your private emails and your ads are targeted based on that..
  - sellyme 5y ago
    > You don’t see the difference between “seeing an email” en transit vs [...] extracting values like when will your airplane depart, when is your vacation, etc I do not see any difference between these parts, no. If a human read my email I would expect them to be completely incapable of not working these things out, so I'm not really too concerned if a computer does it either. > training a ML algorithm on it Also not really. If it were a machine learning algorithm that was trying to write realistic emails there'd be a reasonable concern of it revealing things about the training data, but when it's just generating ad recommendations based on only your data that only you see, I'm not too sure there's a serious privacy concern there. I'm unaware of any allegations that you could uncover private details about someone else's life by looking at an advertisement you received on your own email inbox. > and automatically propagating that to other google products? I would definitely perceive this differently depending on the product, as Google products are usually distinct enough that you can functionally treat them as if they were different companies (and often they either used to be, or eventually become so). So in this case there are now four entities that know the contents of the email: the sender, the recipient, Gmail, and e.g., YouTube. But again, I've not heard any claims that Google are using the contents of your emails to decide what YouTube videos to recommend you. It's certainly not outside the realms of plausibility, but that seems like the kind of thing people wouldn't ever shut up about, so I'm surprised that I haven't heard about it if it is in fact happening. > you can sure as hell know that they build an extensive profile out of your private emails Oh absolutely, but I don't see how that's a privacy violation when you gave them your private emails. How much thinking does someone have to do about a message you gave them before it becomes a privacy violation? > and your ads are targeted based on that.. This is the main reason I'm okay with it. Google's entire business model relies on them preventing anyone else from seeing that data, so that they're the only ones who can target ads that effectively. If there was a significant risk of data leaks then I can absolutely see why people would be concerned, but Google has some absolutely gargantuan incentives to avoid that.

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).
      - 5y ago
kaba0 5y ago
You don’t see the difference between “seeing an email” en transit vs training a ML algorithm on it and extracting values like when will your airplane depart, when is your vacation, etc and automatically propagating that to other google products? I mean, it sure is comfortable, but you can sure as hell know that they build an extensive profile out of your private emails and your ads are targeted based on that..
- sellyme 5y ago
  > You don’t see the difference between “seeing an email” en transit vs [...] extracting values like when will your airplane depart, when is your vacation, etc I do not see any difference between these parts, no. If a human read my email I would expect them to be completely incapable of not working these things out, so I'm not really too concerned if a computer does it either. > training a ML algorithm on it Also not really. If it were a machine learning algorithm that was trying to write realistic emails there'd be a reasonable concern of it revealing things about the training data, but when it's just generating ad recommendations based on only your data that only you see, I'm not too sure there's a serious privacy concern there. I'm unaware of any allegations that you could uncover private details about someone else's life by looking at an advertisement you received on your own email inbox. > and automatically propagating that to other google products? I would definitely perceive this differently depending on the product, as Google products are usually distinct enough that you can functionally treat them as if they were different companies (and often they either used to be, or eventually become so). So in this case there are now four entities that know the contents of the email: the sender, the recipient, Gmail, and e.g., YouTube. But again, I've not heard any claims that Google are using the contents of your emails to decide what YouTube videos to recommend you. It's certainly not outside the realms of plausibility, but that seems like the kind of thing people wouldn't ever shut up about, so I'm surprised that I haven't heard about it if it is in fact happening. > you can sure as hell know that they build an extensive profile out of your private emails Oh absolutely, but I don't see how that's a privacy violation when you gave them your private emails. How much thinking does someone have to do about a message you gave them before it becomes a privacy violation? > and your ads are targeted based on that.. This is the main reason I'm okay with it. Google's entire business model relies on them preventing anyone else from seeing that data, so that they're the only ones who can target ads that effectively. If there was a significant risk of data leaks then I can absolutely see why people would be concerned, but Google has some absolutely gargantuan incentives to avoid that.