Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-privacy-idUSKBN14U1FL https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/10/whatsapp-... http://www.kemplittle.com/site/articles/kl_bytes/the-draft-e...
But let's not be naive: if Google will stop reading our emails in order to send us personalized ads, that's because it doesn't really need to. People share just enough outside their email environment for Google to do its thing. Another sign of which those worrying about privacy should be aware.
People still use email for all kinds of business, of course. But their day-to-day personal activities, the kind that marketers care about ("I've taken up kayaking!", "I'm pregnant!") don't usually show up in emails any more, they get posted on social media.
Speak for yourself, I don't like to imagine that at all.
As it is, they're presumably still reading our gdocs, address books, calendars, hangouts, search histories and broswing histories, and geolocations/third party app usage for all the android users. Email data is white noise compared to this.
I'd wonder how IT could be so stupid to put up with this if Microsoft hadn't also made pervasive surveillance mandatory.
So you haven't worked in an industry where you had that data and tried it then? In my experience you are completely, utterly wrong.
That's certainly the bullshit narrative Google wants you to believe.
And so it goes. Coupled with AI and the amount of data they are able to feed into the AI engines, I am guessing this won't regress their ad targeting.
They have also managed to supplant it with other avenues. Google Travel, Google Calendar and other apps have explicit permission to read your email, Google serves email images off their own servers which gives them a tracking beacon and behavioural data across cohorts. All this adds a level of indirection but still gives them access to behavioural data and user intent.
Based on the numbers in the article like doubling their "large business" user base in the past year, I think Diane Greene will lead them to generating huge revenue in the Enterprise sector. Also, I think freemium versions of Google software, directed at consumers, will be increasingly popular in the future.
Microsoft's "premium" push is actually moving toward more invasive surveillance.
They've been ramping up the marketing doublespeak about their "telemetry" in the last 12 months. Maybe that is a sign they'll back off sometime soon, but so far, it's "Full steam ahead, users be damned."
I suspect the scanning of emails hasn't yielded the personalization once hoped. And the bad publicity outweighs any future potential.
Sounds like a sleazy salesman to me.
The thing is: never, not even once, has Google offered me an ad with goods and services I was interested in.
[this is exactly happening]
On the other hand, if its about offering me good and services which other companies want me to become interested in, then we have a different deal going on.
Hmm. I could actually see that working, as a spinoff of concierge services offered by companies like American Express.
my accountant preparing my tax return for free in exchange for... inviting ...a sleazy salesman [to] sneak a peek at them and find new ways to sell me stuff.
We have to stop this madness of thinking that "John READS my diary" means the same thing as "The function fread() READS nitems objects". Those don't mean the same thing except in a metaphorical sense. It's insane.
Some one wrote fread, it could've been john, and john absolutely could be reading your email. Look at the what happened with ubers god mode.
That said the value of gmail for me exceeds the risk of people I care about reading my email getting access or having access. However my(and probably your) subjective view on the value of your emails is absolutely subjective.
1. Targeted ads catch my attention better. Frequently I don't even notice or remember irrelevant adds.
2. Targeted ads are almost always, SEOed (if you will) to me; that is, they seem relevant, they offer the solution needed to fix the precise problem I'm discussing in the email chain, I click, I read, I would buy, but I realize that the product offered is nothing like what I've been reading about on the landing page.
3. Targeted adds are much more effective at convincing me to spend money on stuff or services that I could have lived without.
Sure, I should toughen up mentally against ads, but until I do, I protect myself from ads that will manipulate me and one way to do that is to prefer irrelevant ads when I need to see them.
Practically, once add service knows I am women, it insist on showing me ads for menstruation cups everywhere I browse. I also find juxtaposition of baby accessories and relaxation bullshit on metal, programming or games site mood killing. When they know less about me, I actually get less weird more neutral less crappy ads.
Corollary: if you can't show a relevant ad, HOW ABOUT NOT SHOWING AN IRRELEVANT AT ALL?
Ads are an insidious and highly effective form of psychological warfare. They play on human fears, insecurities, neuroses and instinctual weaknesses in order to part people from their hard-earned time and resources.
You might say the ads just bring their attention to needs they didn't know they had. I would say the opposite, that they create needs where there none existed to begin with.
You need to give up on your content the day you started using gmail, no matter what the TOS says.
I actually host my own email but every time I send a message to somebody using one of these webmails it gets indexed and monetized.
But I would argue that it's a technical problem first and foremost, email security is mostly a joke. If I need to send sensitive things through emails I can always use PGP to actually protect it, instead of relying on the goodwill of the email provider not to peek into the message. If people really valued their privacy they'd be doing something similar.
http://moneyinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/nypostoutbrai...
Benefitting. You.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B2044DNCEAAHmu-.png
The next time you want to buy, say, 9 celebs in open relationships.
http://www.cpawealthacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/R...
This is what ads are. This is what we adblock. This is clickbait, lies, manipulation, visually distracting, space wasting, untrustworthy, barrel scraping garbage.
"Ads inform you about products" in the same way slime mould informs you that your house is too damp. The best individual course of action is not to buy what the mould is selling.
In actuality: they are a waste of my time and mental space
They are about the only people I've ever seen express this view seriously.
The spam filter (hopefully) probably doesn't store that much about me, but an ad targeting bot could be a lot more problematic.
Gmail provides me with a free email service. They already have the full text of all my emails. If they want to use that data to help decide what ads to serve me, I have no problem with that so long as that data isn't shared with anyone else without my consent.
I think its fair for you to accept the terms, if you know what you're getting in return. The problem here is that you will never know exactly what information is stored about you, and how personal it is, and you have zero control over it. Also simply by sending YOU an email, I'm also entangled in the data collection scheme.
Do you have any way of verifying this? I am not accusing google of anything, I just find this to be an interesting level of trust to have with a free online service.
Also, email is transmitted in plain text. Sending an email is more like shouting to your friends in the street, rather than putting a letter into an envelope mailed to the recipient. Thus, I don't think an explicit consent is needed.
That said, I understand that fair use of such information is a concern.
These days Gmail will transfer your email protected by TLS if possible. Not shouting at all.
On the other hand, a program which analyzes mail to ascertain the tastes, interests, and personal plans of the participants is mining much more sensitive data, and it's compiling/storing it off-site long-term, and it's very specific to the individuals involved.
All of us who've used Gmail know how creepy it can get. Send a couple of mails about marriage and suddenly you start seeing targeted ads about engagement rings or other marriage-related things. Google stores this forever and they'll say "Ah, we know this guy was talking about marriage 10 years ago; traditionally, marriages fail after 5 years, we've detected a tense tone in his mails to his wife, BEEP BOP BOOP, DIVORCE LAWYER AD IS RELEVANT".
This inference is not only dubious (ethically and technically), but anyone observing your browsing while you're logged in will see these ads and may assume that you're seeing those ads because you've been searching for information on divorce, not because Google's inference is overzealous, although it may very well be. Search and replace with anything else: new credit cards/bankruptcy lawyers, research on a medical condition/ads for related medicines, etc.; the potential for creepy inference is endless, not to mention the concrete surveillance value provided to literal spies (via PRISM), nor the risk of compromise/abuse outside of the ad space. They don't have to get and process your entire mail archive; they just have to draw their inferences from Google's own inferences in your compiled taste/interest profile.
That's much more serious than a throwaway analysis of whether a mail contains spammy properties or not.
Have you actually seen anything like this? In my experience the ad targeting seems like extremely shallow keyword analysis.
The idea is that once you have any apparatus in place, and funds allocated to the maintenance/operation there of, you will find that people come up with creative ways to use that apparatus to either cement their position in the company or to improve career prospects. This applies to lots of domains, the obvious one being the government. Once you have a drone program, you'll find that someone somewhere WILL find a way to justify its usefulness.
My main problem with data collection is the permanent nature of it, where someone somewhere at some point in time, possibly when the computational costs become feasible, will come up with a seemingly innocuous use of the data that will spiral out of control. Also, is Google hack-proof? Judging by the lawsuits around the self-driving division, apparently its trivial to steal data if you're on the inside.
I personally use AdBlock so I don't see Google ads very often, but I have been creeped out by ads in the past, and I have had Google infer interests in changes to relationship status based on mail content (e.g., offering engagement rings).
I believe they have manual filters to try to stop inferences that are too offensive from being made (e.g. suggesting a divorce), but those, of course, can never be perfect, and it doesn't mean they aren't making the inference or maintaining the data necessary to do so; it just means that they are blocking it from showing up.
I'm not really saying this is either good or bad. The question was why people care less about reading emails to filter for spam than they care about people reading emails to develop a consumer's ad profile. These are some reasons why.
It isn't always accurate, I know a girl that is very not pregnant but gets these things anyway. She babysits occasionally and I suspect that combined with her Baker's card and Walgreen's card give the mass marketing gurus all the information they need to know that she sometimes cares for kids.
Also what’s the likelihood of the NSA blocking your flight or making you disappear in the night? You probably should fear crossing the street more in terms of statistical likelihood of harm.
I get the privacy/freedom arguments however the hyperbole around this stuff is getting ridiculous as the fears are badly supported by actual data and statistical significance.
More people drowned in swimming pools last year than were “disappeared” by the NSA but there seems little hysteria around swimming pools. I pretty sure most of us don’t know a single person on a no-fly list.
Some high levels of paranoia around here it seems.
Yes, they did. Probably just tobacco companies alone.
> It takes a government to do that.
Since corporations are creatures of government, that's true by definition of everything corporations do.
For example your username might differ in order to access a shared calendar.
Also you can generate application passwords for an account. So you can create an SMTP-only application password for your fastmail account.
Fastmail becomes terribly expensive once you realize you need multiple accounts (not just aliases) for different people in the family. At least for me, paying a few hundred dollars on Fastmail (or anywhere else) for email is really way too expensive. I've also written to Fastmail asking for flexible pricing options, but they responded that they're not even considering any changes on pricing/flexibility for the near future.
Edit: If one doesn't need custom domains and office suites, I'd recommend only Posteo! That company is way ahead of others in being better for all humans (read on their website about all the things they do).
Leaving this aside, other factors do favor ProtonMail. The people who run it seem to have their minds and hearts in the right place as far as privacy is concerned.
Another huge problem is the lack of two-factor authentication. How can a security-oriented service not offer TOTP or even SMS 2FA.
Turns out it was a Fastmail bug, and they promptly fixed it.
Some find FastMail’s spam filtering better than Gmail’s, some worse.
* Train the built in Bayesian filter fully * Setup SPF * Setup DKIM * Point MX records at Fastmail directly (rather than forwarding via some other service)
More of a pain than GMail which often "just works", but still relatively simple to setup. I suspect ultimately more robust than using mail forwarding on consumer GMail (the rules of which constantly change and it gets less powerful, if you don't buy GSuite and point your whole domain at it).
Sounds excessive. Does this include any special features beyond privacy? I pay 1€ per month for a privacy-respecting mailbox at posteo.de
Is there some sort of Gmail camera thing I'm not aware of?
From their privacy policy:
"Incoming messages are scanned for the purpose of spam detection unless you disable spam protection for your account... To make message searching fast, we build an index of your messages (this is a table, just like you would find at the back of a reference book, in which you can look up a word to quickly find the emails in which it appears).
No information from any of these activities is used for any other purpose, or to compile any kind of profile on our users."
Although Im not questioning fastmail ability to provide secured email service. Yet I cannot help think why I would rely on a small player for email. I would ask what is the probability of fastmail service getting hacked say compared to gmail.
(Somebody has right pointed out that ) Ad relevance to your email is not same as reading - thinking in same vein should also lead us to believe even (spam) classification can be termed as reading.
Fatmail has a reptuation for not doing this, Google doesn't.
If ad companies fix something please fix the I searched for something and bought it but I get adds for it for the next 4 weeks. That bugs me.
But hey, they don't seem to have used that data.
( = edit for grammar)
I've already paid for Youtube Red and couldn't be happier.
I'm considering moving; Rackspace has pretty good hosted email for $2/user/month. We use it at work - webmail is acceptable though nothing to write home about, and their IMAP implementation is solid so you can just use a client.
But you pay $480/year for 8 email addresses? Ouch.
I have received exceptional support over the years, including them calling me twice when I reported an issue. My account is worth $5/month and I live in Fiji.
> Google Cloud does not scan your data or email in G Suite Services for advertising purposes. Our automated systems scan and index your data to provide you with your services and to protect your data, such as to perform spam and malware detection, to sort email for features like Priority Inbox and to return fast, powerful search results when users search for information in their accounts. The situation is different for our free offerings and the consumer space.
[0] https://support.google.com/googlecloud/answer/6056650?hl=en
Outlook.com offers "Premium" which removes ads. If you stop paying you just get the ads back but your account is otherwise unaffected[0].
Gsuite on the other hand removes ads, but if you stop paying then you lose access to your email and additional messages may bounce.
Apples and oranges.
I found the link [1] here on HN.
[1]: https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
[0] http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/3/23/alumni-lawsuit-a...
Note that this is not what the article says. It says that they stopped scanning Gmail for ads, but does not say they stopped scanning email for non-ad purposes.
Google's new problem is "How do we get access to the contents of these new communication channels so we can continue to read peoples' conversations?". Those new channels are walled gardens and you can't just create a new email client and say "Switch to GInsta for your Instagrams! We give you 2GB of storage!" Unlike the switch to Gmail, the switch to GInsta would represent a hard barrier to the "true" Instagram network.
Google is becoming the new MS; losing relevance with the younger crowd who are all about "social" platforms, and becoming more and more an enterprise sales model. What happens when Facebook goes after web search?
When you read an email, your intent is either to understand what the sender is asking you (new email), or get the info you asked for (response to your email).
In the majority of cases a contextual ad is 1. pretty weird, 2. pretty against your primary intent.
Might as well showing you ads related to your recent browsing history, imo.
" But instead of scanning a user’s email, the ads will now be targeted with other personal information Google already pulls from sources such as search and YouTube. "
Basically, they have your browser history, and can tie that to your real world ID.
Your email is pretty trivial compared to your browser history.
Does the actual OS track you or is it individual apps?
If you're thinking "Why not just build a faraday cage?" then you're thinking the right thing.
RF dead chambers are bloody expensive for a reason: you can't emulate them by pasting some paint on a wall.
Then my very next thought is, "Who is going to notice my house-sized faraday cage, who are they going to tell, and what are those people going to do in turn?"
We must keep an open eye though for the moment when she gets fired and replaced by a shark, like when she got fired from VMWare.
"They have such a strong baseline of the predilections of their users, and by association with those they regularly communicate - by their overlapping interests and behaviors, googles ad dossier on any given user is complete enough to no longer read the drivel one sends to another to predict your future choices.
1. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/congress...
Said differently the relevance that can be extracted from your specific email is less than the cumulative knowledge that Google has about you from other sources.
This is 100% conjecture, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was this domain targeting (which is what many advertisers were using) that was the thing that Google's big clients were complaining about.
This seems like one of those decisions that is a net negative for functionality in favor of quelling some misguided privacy concerns. Hopefully this doesn't lessen the quality of ads by much.
If you're going to see ads for things, why on earth wouldn't you want them to try to better target you? The whole point is for you to find out about things that might be useful for you.
Why would I want less of the useful things? Why would I want worse advertising?
Even in a saner scenario, the most informative ad you can imagine will still isolate you from the information you would have got by doing your own research. But since you have most of the information you wanted to have, you won't bother checking that much more.
IMO even in the best case scenario, helping people to be lazy on things they are interested in is counterproductive in the long term.
Why do some people dislike advertising? Is it only that they are unmatched? Are there other reasons. If you wish to find an answer to your wondering, wonder on those issues.
I mean if I write a Nigerian prince email and send it to my mum, it should reach her no matter what the text says, right?
I remember there was a recent paper that dealt with this, too, but I can't find it right now. But it basically demolished this argument that it's impossible to stop spam if the email is encrypted.
They do say "In future blog posts, we will cover the challenges of preventing ProtonMail from being used by spammers and the challenges of doing spam filtering with end-to-end encrypted emails which we cannot read", but I can't find any such blog posts.
https://developers.facebook.com/videos/f8-2017/how-whatsapp-...
Sending emails to new/random contacts shouldn't be that easy anyway.
There's a big difference between sending 10k copies of a plaintext email, and retrieving a public key and encrypting to 10k recipients - not to mention that filtering out all non signed/not-signed-by-trusted-key should be a decent start for a whitelist/greylist.
I'd be curious if anyone ever got gpg-encrypted spam?
Personally, I'd like to have the option, but as I don't, I don't use gmail.
(Right?)
Interesting timing with the story earlier this week about Wal-Mart telling vendors to stop using AWS
Edit: removed "rights"
You're confusing a want with a right.
You have no idea how wrong you are.
Now Google knows: - all your searches (know your interests), - a great percentage of the pages you visit (ads and analytics) - all your contacts and how frequently you connect to them (metadata in gmail) - the places you visit (geolocation in Android) - Google logins (know the sites that interest you the most)
Your email contents is completely unecessary.
I wonder if Google will be pushing end-to-end email encryption? They have already had some experiments on it.
They have the majority browser, they have the lions share of email hosting. It they played their cards right, they could claim the entire email ecosystem, except for the small portion who won't use Google products on principle. The questions would be would 3rd party clients be allowed, and how would Apple fight it.
Or maybe this is all just a smoke screen to sucker dumb corps. In the existing architecture, your emails still need to be scanned so they can be indexed for search. You could get the same result scanning these indexes as scanning the emails themselves, so from a privacy perspective it could be a non-event.
You seem to comment frequently here on HN where I consider most users to be above average in the level of intelligent replies so your trolling seems quite out of place.
I feel like any device that has a microphone is suspect if you want total privacy, but listening to what you say seems like an integral part of the device. You can only hope (and independently verify) that they don't store everything you say.
I could be wrong and/or they could be lying about how the product really works. Could probably monitor your network traffic if you really wanted to find out.
For example, if I write "I love coffee" in an email, am I more likely to see a Starbucks ad when I visit watch a YouTube video?
A few weeks ago a friend and I were talking exclusively through WhatsApp about a trip to London(in Portuguese with our very unusual jargon), I didn't do any search for anything related it was all within our conversation, a couple days later Facebook had a post on my timeline saying: "heading to London? Check what your friends did there".
I don't remember reading anywhere that WhatsApp reads your conversations for ads, but it was clear to me that's where they got the information, it was spooky at first.
Speaking of which, I had a similarly creepy moment just yesterday. I was watching an episode of the Simpsons, and wanted to Google the Bart blackboard gag in the intro because I didn't get it. Just I type the first word and it immediately suggested the rest. Very creepy because I wasn't watching through any Google service (on an Android phone though).
The late 1970's was probably the last time anybody truly understood 100% of what was going on in any system.
The bottom line is that you have to trust some people. I totally understand those that don't trust Google. I happen to trust them today.
- no scanning emails
Are different things
In this case it is google's code running on google's computers.
Which is mostly based on Free Software, starting with GNU/Linux. The Affero General Public License is intended to disallow this loophole of "it is only running on our servers, hence we are technically not distributing it, so we do not have to release the code": https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html
I wasn't expecting this from a company that makes most of it's revenue through advertising. Sets a cautiously positive precedent.
That would certainly cause an enormous loss of goodwill, but.... imagine this scenario:
Google has some slow growth quarters, they need to keep the numbers up for shareholders. They start to examine what they can squeeze. Gmail costs them X (hundreds?) millions per year, but doesn't gain much from it...
Certainly its unlikely, as it is also a SSO tool, etc. Still....
They may get rid of one of their applications (gmail OR inbox), but I doubt they'd get rid of the entire platform. They'd lose more revenue than they'd recover.
Companies can make money without tracking you 24/7 and reading all of your private content. They just choose not to, because it's easier, and then spread the propaganda that those things are "needed" to stay in business.
I also think this power is symmetric in who it enables. Unlike land ownership or TV broadcasting entry isn't expensive and the needed tools can easily be smuggled. Anyone can easily gain immensely from this free-flowing font of knowledge and communication.
A potential dictator must take great pains to use gain that huge power in the Internet era and I think you are right that we will see some insanely powerful dictators. However, I think we see fewer than in previous eras though.
Anyway this may solve the tragedy of the commons situation we're in now and allow us to move away from the technology war of ad blockers, ad blocker blockers, ad blocker blocker blockers, etc.
edit: removed comment on clarity of Gsuite vs Free due to downvote brigade.
Google doesn't read e-mails from GSuite. So the change is to stop reading from Gmail's free accounts.
Original post: https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
Disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on this.
>Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud sells a package of office software, called G Suite, that competes with market leader Microsoft Corp. Paying Gmail users never received the email-scanning ads like the free version of the program, but some business customers were confused by the distinction and its privacy implications, said Diane Greene, Google’s senior vice president of cloud. “What we’re going to do is make it unambiguous,” she said.
"Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change"
https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
I used to see Google as a stalker. How naive I was. There are billions of people being stalked, exploited, and the whole process is automated. It comes to me that users are not victims of stalking, they are lab rats.
Now Google stopped reading emails for ads, but they'll still read for other purposes, which still makes me as a user feel insecure. I value my privacy, I have my dignity, I shouldn't be a lab rat that they can just observe however they want only because they provide free cheese.
Even if I start using a paid account to stop them from reading my emails (assume paid account with better privacy protection is possible), I couldn't stop them from reading others'. Stopping the data collection of one user won't change the situation, they still have other lab rats' data they could collect and analyze, which enables them to learn or predict other rats' behaviors.
The worst thing is, Google is not the only company doing this right now. Surveillance technologies are developing, it's like every data company has grown their teeth and become more thirsty for blood.
Edit: words.