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Comment by njarboe | Hacker News Reader

From the link: "G Suite’s Gmail is already not used as input for ads personalization, and Google has decided to follow suit later this year in our free consumer Gmail service."

They are definitely still reading your gmail. How else would the spam and other filters work? They can also use it under this policy for anything but "ads personalization". Machine learning, Google product integration, other recommendation not deemed to be ads, refining your google profile, etc. A very narrow scope of exclusion.

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Well, one might reasonably ask whether "reading your mail" (as in, running an algorithm on it to try to classify phishing vs non) is a security cost or benefit.

Spearphishing is a huge source of compromise at the moment; antiphishing filters might, in that view, be considered a security feature rather than a security fault.

On the other hand, I have, frankly, never understood these privacy arguments. Is it a privacy violation if someone checks a checksum of my incoming mail against a blacklist? What if they compute a hash of my mail to check the DKIM signature? And if those are OK, why is an ML model more of a problem?

>Is it a privacy violation if someone checks a checksum of my incoming mail against a blacklist?

No, the privacy concern is about the potential for abuse if there is a known place in the world where a very detailed account of all my online (and some offline) activities, contacts, communication and personal interests is stored.

It obviously arouses the interest and desires of criminals, governments, employers, politicians, landlords, insurance companies, creditors, marketers, ex partners, extremists and bigots, journalists, potential mates, researchers, etc.

Some of these groups are overlapping and some of the concerns might only arise in the distant future. Governments change. Ownership of companies changes. Personal circumstances and opinions change, but you can't take anything back once its out.

Spam filters don't need to store all the contents. They can simply store hashes of contents.

So even if someone hacks into the spam filters, they won't be able to reconstruct content from your account. They _might_ have insight into things like word usage, but they won't have reconstructed sentences or the like, a priori.

You can build systems like this without having long-term storage of the content, which protects against data issues for one-time leaks.

So I ordered some cigars online the other day. I did this on a device not logged into google, in privacy mode.

An email with the order went to my @gmail. The next day in my Youtube videos the ads where for stop smoking patches.

They read email.

Google also allows ads targeting a list of emails. Could be that the cigar seller asked google to show you the ads.

Why would the cigar seller ask to show me an ad for a STOP SMOKING CIGARS product? Also as I said, this showed up in Youtube the day after I ordered and the email hit my gmail. Never seen those ads before.

The cigar seller sells its customer list to a data broker or uses a third party service that does the same (e.g. it uses your email address as a user identifier in a third party analytics product). Then advertisers buy that data.

The sold it in less then 24 hours?

Well, it's not like they need to ship the list of email addresses across the company in a truck.

> They read email.

Sometimes hilariously. A few years ago a friend emailed me a barbershop quartet video, and I spent the next couple of weeks getting hairdresser ads ...

Given their vast amounts of information about mail, might their spam filter work by only examining the header? That is, of course, still 'reading' mail - though it may be an acceptable trade off for privacy minded people.

And, if it's being interpreted by a machine, does that really count as reading?

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