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Comment by eatbitseveryday | Hacker News Reader

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??).

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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