The digital equivalent of the envelope is encryption - the carrier is allowed to see the outside but not the inside. The function of encryption is lack of comprehension - the carrier still knows the exact encrypted bytes of your mail, but cannot comprehend it. We generally accept that this is already a useful proxy for privacy.
Imagine a mail protocol that somehow lets you encrypt everything but the part necessary for spam identification. The carrier is able to apply some algorithm to determine whether it's spam, but no other information. I'll assume everyone thinks this sounds good (though impossible). Because encryption is just lack of comprehension, an algorithm that is only capable of parsing an "is spam" feature from email has the same level of privacy as this hypothetical. But an algorithm that is capable of parsing "your credit card payment is overdue" is able to comprehend something else, which is a different level of privacy.
(Of course, encryption is better than "They're not running anything that can parse this," because it says "Nobody can parse this.")
The answer here is privacy laws and auditability.
That they use millions of computing-dollars to extract this information and store it.
Supposedly spam detection does not need to understand the numbers in your bank emails. Supposedly it needs mostly information about you previous contacts and spammy patterns from the rest of the internet.
The point being that you cannot misuse the information you do not have. Google is very good at thinking of a lot of this kind of quality of life functionality, they do not seem to realize how creepy and disconcerting they can be.
> Either way it’s just a cpu pushing around ones and zeroes.
What is even this supposed to mean? also the information "kill on sight" on your profile of a terrorist association is just one bit, do not worry about that. The fact that they are digital does not mean that the data won't affect your life nor that human or machine will take complex decision based on them.
My point is that they already have the information, so any potential misuse or abuse is possible regardless of what types of parsing they're doing. It might just be inconvenient.
There is also a security issue, I trust google to keep my email secure, I trust less google to keep my profile metadata secure as selling it is its main business model.
My issue is that federal law regulates what information my bank can share with 3rd parties and allows me to opt out. The ethical thing to do is at least hold oneself to a similar standard. If I had worked on those projects I would have made it policy to ignore emails from healthcare providers and financial institutions outright, since there is far more harm that can be done than good.
I have no problem with data collection when it's done responsibly. But I get the feeling that most developers/engineers working on these features have warped senses of ethics and don't consider the large scale implication of what they're doing, or if they do they just ignore it. Either way, it's the blatant disregard for privacy that bothers me.
Nonsense. It's a totally reasonable ethical viewpoint to assume that a user who opts in to their financial institution to send their data to Gmail has opted into Gmail reading that email and trying to provide awesome features on top of it. It's not like Google keeps it a secret when it does this kind of stuff. This is the bread and butter what Google is, and anyone not interested in that kind of thing should choose another email alternative.
Google taking privacy seriously means they treat the data you share with them with respect. In this situation it is you, as a person who does not trust Google, who is apparently not taking privacy seriously when you opt into sending them your financial records.
Do you think customers have absolutely no responsibility over what applications and services they choose to use?
I realize the downvotes will come... But also take the time to let me know what I'm getting wrong.