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Comment by jmull | Hacker News Reader

I should probably get fitted for a tinfoil hat because my immediate reaction was, "Oh shit! They must've developed something now that tracks you better and is less obvious."

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My educated guess would be that given the proliferation of services offered by Google, it indeed has many more sources of information on each individual, and having email as one of them perhaps proves less beneficial today as it did when Gmail was first introduced. Now there is the Android OS which gives information about apps you use, locations, activities, and online searches, map queries, bookmarks, sentiments via G+, etc. So, it can disable auto-scanning of emails perhaps as a PR move (or, should I hope it is going to eventually evolve its email service to include encrypting emails, and this is one step in that direction??).

The article explains it plainly: they weren't getting the message to business people that Gmail on Google Apps isn't scanned despite free Gmail being, so they stopped scanning Gmail altogether.

Didn't they also get caught a couple of times scanning the email despite saying they weren't? I know there was a lawsuit alleging that they scanned the email of many university students after saying they wouldn't [0], which I think was settled for high 3 or low 4 figures per person, although I'm not sure (and wasn't a participant).

[0] http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/3/23/alumni-lawsuit-a...

stopped scanning Gmail altogether.

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.

To be more accurate the article says they stopped scanning for ads that appear inside gmail. Whether they still scan emails in the free gmail for use outside gmail is unknown, but I may be being pedantic...

(disclosure, I work on gmail, although nothing related to ads)

I can't find a citation, but I'm fairly confident that that's never been the case. Ad targeting from emails has always been siloed to within gmail. To quote the post:

>Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change.

That's pretty unequivocal.

Thanks!

Any spam filtering implies scanning right? (Unless the filtering is purely on basis of headers and other non-message-body info)

It depends on whether you consider mail headers part of the email. I personally think scanning mail headers still counts as scanning email.

Well yeah. They have to scan content for you to effectively search your own email, which is one of their flagship features.

I can't edit the above, but the context I meant was non-ad, non-email purposes.

I agree - I read the article. But having many sources to feed the ads probably made the decision to announce universally that emails are no longer going to be scanned easier to do in the first place.

Yep, I agree. Email is not really a good channel for analysis anyway since it has a very high signal-to-noise ratio. A lot of kids who've grown up in the texting era think that email is for old fogies and rely solely on shorter-form messages via Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, and/or SMS, so their emails are almost pure noise and no conversational content.

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?

It's also prob not the best source of features (in a ML sense) for choosing ads.

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.

I see it as an opportunity to use ML to improve targeting. Ad clicks could be used as the training data since users are less likely to click on non-relevant or inappropriate ads. This would help with avoiding inappropriate keywords, e.g. death in the family.

From the article:

" 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. "

They own tracking cookie ad systems and can tie your tracking cookies to your gmail account pretty trivially.

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.

> Now there is the Android OS

Does the actual OS track you or is it individual apps?

The "Web & App Activity" in http://myaccount.google.com states the following:

> Google can save information like:

> - Websites and apps you use

> - Your activity on websites and in apps that use Google services

The Google Play Services package that is pre-installed on basically every Android phone with Google Play tracks you.

Actually, you can buy some paint that blocks all RF signals. It's absurdly expensive but quite effective. There aren't many ways to get signals out of a room painted with the stuff.

If you're thinking "Why not just build a faraday cage?" then you're thinking the right thing.

Actually RF shielding paint is very poor. Manufacturers advertise them with "99.5 %" or so, which equates a measly 20 dB. Additionally, correctly applying these is quite difficult, and incorrect application greatly diminishes the shielding. (You also need to cover everything, including ceiling and floor, not just the walls). Even when correctly applied, the attenuation is so weak, a cell phone will still work. Shielded facilities are built differently and are far more expensive than shielding paint.

RF dead chambers are bloody expensive for a reason: you can't emulate them by pasting some paint on a wall.

One of my first jobs was building shielded boxes for a sensitive RF measurement setup. Containing the RF output from something like a laptop is hard. I lined the inside of the boxes with copper beryllium mesh (attached with glue, since nails become little antennas), soldered all the joints to ensure electrical continuity, and put a copper beryllium gasket all around the lid to make sure there was continuity when the box was closed.

> RF dead chambers are bloody expensive for a reason: you can't emulate them by pasting some paint on a wall.

Couldn't you just stick yourself in a metal box (with a metal door that is careful to get a good seal)?

Well yeah, that's what those chambers are. Except it's a bit more complicated to do than "just" :)

How do you propose to breathe in there?

By opening the door when not in use.

If you need continuous use, two rooms. One that acts as an "airlock" with an outer door that is open only when the door to the other room is closed. Battery operated fans and lights used as necessary.

Note that the "inner room" might be as small as a ammo crate depending on your use case.

I've thought about turning my whole house into a faraday cage way too many times to be considered sane still.

I've always thought that would be cool, then just have a fiber connection for communications and either air gap your main power or provide your own via solar and wind.

It's fun, isn't it? It's one of those things that costs way too much to be practical but you can't help but try to think of ways to get the cost down. Mini-SpaceX in a useless domain.

Ermmm we used the copper nanotube paint once on an office and, well, it sucked. Bad. Cell phones only worked in this small corner of the office, and wifi was chaotic. Something about signals can't get in, but they also can't get out, so they collide ...

I think the word you're looking for is "reflect."

Yes, thank you. Reflect. It created considerable interference.

Isn't there RF-blocking wallets? Seems like something I'd probably buy if I had an identity worth stealing.

I have one of those and it's kind of a PITA. I actually didn't realize it blocked RF until after I bought it. It's annoying because I can't just tap my wallet on the MUNI gates or the card reader at work, I have to open up the damn thing and press the edge of the card poking out of the card holder against it and hope it works (sometimes it does, sometimes I have to pull out the card).

I probably just have too much junk in my wallet, but I can't ever just tap the wallet against an NFC reader anyway. It either doesn't read anything or it reads one of the other low-power NFC cards contained (I think I have 3-4). For quick access to a single card maybe you can get a lanyard or one of those retracty thingies people wear around their belt loops?

Well, if I was doing security at your company, I'd probably want employee credentials to be visible at all times, which would also happen to take care of your problem.

Employee credentials should not be visible when the employee isn't inside a secured area. If you work at a site with a Security Officer, try inviting them out to lunch and not hiding your credentials. See if they care.

> "Why not just build a faraday cage?"

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?"

Lan party.

If Howard had known of this paint, then he wouldn't have had to put Mylar all over his house and look like a kook! Jimmy wouldn't have had to do so much to help him out... maybe he'd still be alive!

Definitely, they probably realize they get better targeting by using demographic metrics like Facebook does - age, wealth, gender, interests, likes, etc - than they do by scanning email contents for keywords.

Exactly. From the article: "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."

Perhaps you should ;) Google is a corporation, my immediate reaction was "They must've developed something more profitable" - and they have, they're continuing to compete with MS/AWS for business customers.

The smartest reaction I've read so far. But if you learn to know the Director of Cloud, miss Greene, it gets less scary. She believes in a eat-or-be-eaten world as we live in today, an argument like energy friendly data centers would still be a thing. She might've just done it because it's the right thing to do.

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.

Hah. I came here to basically say the same:

"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.

It means their behavioral targeting now out earns contextual targeting, by quite a bit. This is just spin.

That or they will have someone else read the emails for them... like the NSA. Also, all "cloud" emails older than 6 months don't require a warrant to be obtained [1].

1. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/congress...

Same. I completed the headline in my head with "because they don't need to anymore".

me too, but i doubt their technology can be stopped with tinfoil

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