How can anyone be sure of this? This is only one of Google’s practices that seems to follow a pervasive pattern of eroding open internet standards while presenting Google’s own proprietary implementation as somehow superior. Eventually, the open standard loses all meaning because the most popular implementation does not actually adhere to it. Meanwhile, Google reaps enormous benefits in the form of additional signals for its advertising business. How can this not be grounded in malicious intent?
> and that there are some very smart people working on spam prevention at Google.
There are some very smart people working on advertising at Google. The rush to forget the primary nature of Google - it’s an adtech firm - is why they’ve been allowed to skate for so long. Gmail’s spam filtering is just a pretext for passing all email through a machine learning system. Sure, one possible signal emitted by that system is whether a message is spam or not. Perhaps this determination is conflated with wether the message is useful for ad targeting: after all, when viewed from Google’s own perspective certain e-mail messages contain no information which can be used for ad targeting, so they must be spam. The user’s interests are clearly secondary to this.
So, back to the “smart people” working on this: at what point do we begin judging engineers for working at Google? There’s a lot of highly vitriolic criticism that emanates from Google’s workforce on a variety of subjects, but how many of them would actually pull the pin and leave their employer? I don’t have any statistics to offer, but it seems to me that we still have a ways to go before Google has become completely drained of engineering mindshare.