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Comment by SteveNuts | Hacker News Reader

Duh. Anyone who didn't think this was happening is simply not paying attention. Gmail will show a "track your package" link on Amazon order emails, adds flight or hotel booking to your calendar, and shows ads relevant to whatever email you are looking at.

This is how Google makes money, and they're not very subtle about it.

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> shows ads relevant to whatever email you are looking at

Not since 2017. "Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization" https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...

When I first saw Google Trips I thought that it was so great. It was so useful to have an automated tool that grouped all my trips' bookings and travel arrangements. Then I was like: "Waiiiit a minute! They're reading ALL my emails...OMFG.". I am now migrating towards Fastmail one provider at a time.

Yup, this was the wake-up call for me. I know everyone here is like "duh of course they look at everything," but sometimes it takes a concrete case to really feel what that means.

I switched to Protonmail soon after that, and honestly I barely miss Gmail at all now. I just changed my workflow to not use email as a catchall for everything that I needed to be able to search.

Why are you anthropomorphizing an algorithm?

Don't you think you could get your point across without being obtuse and patronizing?

"It's not like individual employees are reading your mail, its just an algorithm that handles it automatically."

That could have been a cooler move.

Companies are moral persons.

Fastmail also has to read your email in order to transfer it from the sender to your browser.

Exactly....I was like, people are surprised by this? How did they think gmail worked? It doesn't seem to anymore, but years ago it had been showing ads in the sidelines relevant to the content of your recent messages.

>Exactly....I was like, people are surprised by this? How did they think gmail worked?

The problem is Google continuously changes the terms of the deal. For e.g. If in 2006 I looked at what Google did with my data, and decided to create a gmail account, that is not the same trade-off that exists today. Its a never ending privacy creep.

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Gmail no longer shows ads related to email content, or uses email content at all for advertising purposes. Yes, the deal changes, but in this case it got better since 2006.

> Anyone who didn't think this was happening is simply not paying attention.

This is not so simple. Previous replies to similar claims: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20052749 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20052851

"You should have been paying attention" can be said with respect to all such incidents. If we don't have the outcry and register our protest then you can pretty much guarantee that nothing will change. In this case, Google's scanning could be benign, but the fact that they're building large scale systems to do this is what is scary. It only takes one or two economic downturns to make a company like Google turn full-on evil; when the bean counters start ordering the engineers (if that hasn't happened already).

>This is how Google makes money, and they're not very subtle about it.

And us being not very subtle about our protest is how Google has reversed policies in the past.

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