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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

I find this curious because I have been repeatedly told by Google people on HN that Google stopped reading GMail years ago.

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Yeah... it was maybe one and a half years ago I think?

But they stopped reading it for showing contextual ads.

They're still reading it to show you useful information across Google properties, like in Google Maps the location of the theater you bought tickets to see a play to tonight. Removing that would be removing a useful features that people liked (unlike the ads).

there's always a catch with these guys.

They also read emails to catch spam and phishing attempts.

They also read emails to index them for search.

Even though email search can't find anything. Ridiculous coming from Google.

Really? I don't have a problem usually with gmail

I support the parent's comment.

I've had e-mail messages open in the GMail web interface that when I search for the words I can actually see on my screen come up with nothing.

Ah, I misinterpreted this comment. At first I thought you meant "Search" as in the product. Of course you actually just meant searching your Gmail.

I downed you before but can't undo it now it seems. My apologies.

true, but you don't have to read 100% of them to train the spam and phishing catchers. But you do need to read 100% of the emails, i.e. no sampling, if you want get a comprehensive purchase history of each gmail user--which they seem to have.

You have to read the incoming emails to filter them.

There's no way to know if the email you were sent is spam without looking at it, in some sense.

For the longest time the going claim was that Google had automated systems that used parsed data on your email only to serve ads on demand (in relation to the email(s) -- not following your around the net). That nothing was being logged/crawled, nothing was being ingested, etc. That seemed fairly innocuous and seems like a reasonable return.

But we learned over time that they're doing massive data trawling, in this case every purchase made. And as always there's a theoretical advantage...maybe in the future Google will identify when you can get something for less, etc. But the reward (much like the location of a theatre) is so tiny and abstract that if people had the choice most would say no thanks. Just as I don't need Google to tell me about my flights, I have much better alternatives for that. In each case the advantage is 99% for Google, 1% for the consumer, but it's coached in a "your advantage" pitch much like a Payday Loan company commercial that talks about how much they just want to help people out.

Google Maps on iOS a while back was seemingly irritated that I had its permission set to only see location while I have the app open. "But if you allow background logging we can tell you where you parked!" it whined. In return for giving Google the wholesale access to my location I would get this minuscule possible advantage. No thanks.

What do you mean by "reading" here? How did you think, as an IT person, things like those nice flight displays in Inbox worked? The assistant delivery notifications? Some script had to read those, didn't it? Not to mention do spam classification?

Or did "reading" in your post mean that you think people actually read and manually type in those lists?

There were suggestions from Gmail that they had stopped attempting to parse the contents of emails a while ago.

Misleading suggestions, as they had stopped parsing them to attempt to generate adverts from the data they could gather there, but continued parsing for other purposes.

Maybe it's about ads targeting, but not for other purposes. How can it filter out spams without reading your mails?

Exactly what I wanted to write.

Just recently someone here said that mails are not screened/indexed for this purpose when I said: "If you are not paying for it, you are the product." They are not giving anything for free.

Since I was the person who said that, What I said, very specifically, is that they aren't screened for advertising. Which is true. As another user mentions, there's basically no mail service that doesn't "screen" your email. Spam classification is a form of screening.

The data used to show you upcoming flights and purchase info isn't used to advertise for you, its used to show (hopefully) useful reminders.

Maybe they were talking about GMail offered through GSuite?

You're confusing Gmail scanning incoming mail for generating relevant ads versus providing services on top (eg. spam filtering). They stopped the former, not the latter.

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