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Google also has to scan your email to index it, for searching. And as far as privacy is concerned, that is the biggest danger, the NSA (or whoever) being able t
by eggnet 13y ago
Google also has to scan your email to index it, for searching. And as far as privacy is concerned, that is the biggest danger, the NSA (or whoever) being able to ask google for all email with a certain keyword in it.
To summarize, they scan for spam filtering to make email usable, advertising to make it free, and indexing for searching.
I don't see how web based email can function without scanning it. And frankly, I don't see how high quality spam filtering can be done without scanning and sharing data across users in general, not specific to web mail.
- ma2rten 13y agoWhat does it even mean to "scan" emails? If Google receives the email, saves it to disk and later retrieves it again, maybe reformats it, is that really fundamentally different from a technical point of view? It's all bits and bytes after all. Targeted advertising is creepy to humans, because there is some notion that the computer "understands" what you are sending and builds up a profile about you. But, if you take a sober technical point of view, it's hard to accuse Google of anything. Maybe Google should educate it's users more how those ads are generated?