Yahoo, Bucking Industry, Scans Emails for Data to Sell Advertisers
wsj.com
wsj.com
Uhhhhh how about don't read emails? If I have a fantasy football team, please sell me football stuff. If I click on an article relating to health concerns, sell me organic whole foods stuff.
Can you imagine someone 20 years ago throwing all your mail into a scanner and saying, "don't worry I'm only checking for keywords and receipts"?
It seems to me that programmatic ads are popular mainly because it's easier to measure engagement, not because it's more profitable for publishers, then at some point Google and Facebook got the advantage of network effects.
Or even more weird, for products you already bought and are unlikely to buy again.
I don't fully understand why they continued after seeing clickthrough numbers go down across the board. I guess it's easier to sell the concept; only show this ad to people who have already seen this product but they are usually late with the message. If I'm looking at something today chances are by next week/month I have already decided to buy or move on. How many engagement rings can one buy?
An ad for it followed me for weeks.
I didn’t have one too few, I had one too many.
I was the worst possible customer for that ad.
I also thought this is something Duck Duck Go could implement to distinguish itself. It will result in a better experience for advertisers as clicks would be pre-qualified. It's the counter-move to Google's "quality score" which, when you think about it (or actually do advertising), is anti-pre-qualification.
What I mean is this: If people are just looking for information (free) and not wanting to buy, then if I put something in my ad that discourages people from clicking (by putting in a price, for example), then I get less clicks-per-display and my quality score goes down. However, only displaying these ads to people who are looking to buy would negate that.
And what do you mean not publicizing it? It is quite visible on the ads they show it for.
If the other methods could target you technically, they would
Yes, it helps. Contextual ads help me find new customers to market to, hopefully through relevant content that overlaps with my product, but what do I do with all those visitors that stop by and don't convert? Retargeting lets me capture that interest and incrementally improve my media spend - and on tens of millions a year in media spend, this can be significant.
I wish I had better alternative but unfortunately these are the tools we have to work with, and creepy ads that follow you around the internet are going to last until we figure out better ways of spending investor money without feeling like we're burning cash to the Advertising Gods.
It feels like we are wasting so much page space with ineffective ads and too few clickthroughs.
- Game recommendations on Steam and other platforms.
- Highlighted apps on the App Store.
- Before the internet, games and apps in magazines.
Everything else that I have ever spent money on, I have discovered through word of mouth (including places like Reddit or HN), searched for it myself, seen it incidentally in the wild (e.g. hearing a song outside or seeing someone using something) or when browsing shops and stores in person.
How often do other people here remember buying something they saw in an ad (that they didn't already know of)?
Regarding ads on the internet, I really see very few anymore. The ad-blocking and privacy options for browsers seem to be exceedingly good at their job, and I automatically switch to reader view for any page that enables it. These days I am surprised to see an ad online.
I rarely ever watch cable but I swear cable ads would repeat the same exact video ad multiple times per show but maybe it has changed nowadays.
> Why is it that way? Is it really more profitable,
Probably depends on the product. For google search where your search query is generally highly relevant to what you are looking for and therefore advertisers, probably not much. For facebook when I am scrolling through the news feed and I'm not looking for any product in particular, probably a lot because that is the difference between showing me a generic ad with low click through rates versus one that is tailored towards things I probably want and therefore much more likely that I will click on it.
It is. Online, you can use statistics and probability theory to actually test what's more profitable instead of relying on ad-hoc metrics about what "feels good".
> They chase you around the web, even for products you already decided you didn’t want
These are a small minority of online ads. They're displayed in places where nothing more profitable or contextual can be displayed. (I.e., most websites, since most websites are junk.)
If I'm looking at x, selling me something that makes x easier or otherwise compliments x makes a lot more sense than selling me something that I looked at 2 months ago and didn't intend to buy.
Yes, and actually Acxiom is a lot more powerful and comprehensive than your postulation, if you care to look into them.
Unregulated data mining is, in my opinion, going to lead to the next collapse of culture. The cow is already out of the barn and it's on the way to Chicago. I don't think it's an unfair analogy considering the experiments thus far in totalitarian environments.
Kind of refutes the claim that it's just like showing specific emails with date/times to the general public.
https://consumerist.com/2013/07/03/forget-the-nsas-hi-tech-s...
E.g. Superfly Insights [1], Return Path [2]
[1] https://alternativedata.org/data_provider/superfly-insights/
I've been filtering them straight into the trash for the best part of a decade. It seems so backwards to send them when most people check their Facebook more often than their email.
Why not just turn them off? I haven't received a single notification email from then in years
I started to (try to) delete the account several times and always hesitated out of fear. And when I ask myself "what's the harm in leaving it there?" I can't really come up with a good answer.
Also interesting aside, Yahoo/Oath nag me every couple weeks to agree to the new Verizon draconian privacy forfeiture terms. I wonder if they'll eventually block logins and cutoff email forwarding if I never click through. My cynical hunch is that they'll equate logins with consent after updating the TOS to explain this.
Usecase: friend dies, years later some turkey kid stole his facebook bv his login was yahoo email based and BOOM has access to a lot of social media data.
Oath's goal is to be the premier "AdTech" company. According to leadership we're only behind Google and FB. But the division I work in doesn't touch ads so I'm not the best person to talk to.
I assume that if Verizon is being hands off Yahoo must be doing decently well. Otherwise I'd imagine they would be trying to move it in a new direction.
https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
You realize that oblivious third-party storage can exist, right? For example, Tarsnap. It's the the durable-storage equivalent of end-to-end encrypted messaging. The client does all the encrypting; and the client is open-source; so you don't have to trust the third-party at all.
This is a bit more challenging when you want clients to be able to operate over an index of the data, rather than just the raw data (i.e. you want them to be able to search through their stored email)—but it's fully possible to architect a service such that all indexing happens on the client (perhaps distributed between many connected clients in the case of a shared data-source like a Slack workspace), where the backend is just obliviously storing and returning E2E-encrypted copies of generated index chunks, in the same way it obliviously stores and returns E2E-encrypted copies of the data itself.
Every interaction you have through google gives their neural nets a little more data to predict everyone's next reply.
I mean, maybe high-level aggregate data like "X% of users got emails about shopping" might still be in some spreadsheet somewhere, or in people's brains. But no, I can't think of a way any personalized data would still be around.
There's nothing inevitable about this. Even apart from law employees can steer the direction of companies, especially in tech where businesses are so dependent on a relatively small number of them. If you think privacy practises at your place of work are bad, bring it up.
Or is it perhaps more likely that Google gets enough info from users via others means that it simply wasn't getting enough value out of email scanning? Or maybe starting a trend against email scanning hurts competitors more than it hurts themselves?
Google was, only a few months ago, forced by its employees to turn down lucrative defence contracts, and has since committed to not participate in them.
I think if employees manage to accomplish that we can all manage to improve our privacy practises.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/26/google-wi...
> Google actually reverted its policy on the issue and has since stopped collecting data from user email content
So the 'who' would be the parent commenter.
> Do you understand how an email mailbox works?
That type of comment feels so out of place here. I've clearly deeply annoyed you, but it's hard to tell from your reply what exactly your issue is.
Once the data is collected, it can be used at some later date for any purpose whatsoever. It's up to the user to decide if they like the purposes it is being used for today and if they either think the data will be used for purposes they like in the future or will be able to migrate their data off the service.
INAL, but I'm fairly confident you cannot unless you want to get lawsuit. Granted, the terms that practically nobody looks at give companies pretty far reaching grants on how they can use the data but that does not mean they can change the terms on old data that was collected under a previous contract.
I work with personally identifiable information and I have to get approval from a privacy team and a lawyer team to utilize data in any new way because of said contracts.
[1] https://www.oath.com/press/yahoo-provides-notice-to-addition...
There's just no need, or space, for Yahoo anymore.
[1]: While Hotmail doesn't technically exist anymore -- it redirects to Outlook.com now -- I know more than one person who got their email account there back when it was Hotmail, still use it, and still refer to it that way. And at least one of those people is someone younger than I am and who's tech-savvy enough to be putting together his own PCs. Anecdata, of course, but I think a good illustration of why services like Yahoo Mail are likely to exist way, way longer than we might think.
Headline should read:
"Verizon after acquiring Yahoo disregards normal tech-company conventions and snoops on everyone's emails like a scummy ISP."
I personally don't know anyone daft enough to use their services up here in Canada - even in the US (where I have personally seen the 'average Joe's' tech knowledge - especially in central and southern states - shockingly much less than that in Canada) it seemed folks avoided it, except the lowest-of-the-low in terms of tech knowledge.
They have, for the years since AOL was known universally as the worst tech company, seemingly fought for that title.
EDIT: Surprised at the downvotes. I'd love to know why.
When it started to fail, it was lamented, but technically? It was exploitive and full of dumb subscribers, but the tech was fine.
> except the lowest-of-the-low in terms of tech knowledge.
Used yahoo for decades, since I was around when it started. Still do, for one email address.
Yep, AOLserver was one of the first “app servers” and it was well regarded. The other PG built his company around it.