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Comment by s3000 | Hacker News Reader

>If Google isn’t making any money from you on Gmail

Isn't Gmail the core pillar of Google's ad network? Whoever is logged into Gmail tells Google who is using an IP address. Facebook is the other ad network because they can also link requests to ids.

Facebook can monetize Instagram because they can sell targeted ads. Likewise, Google can monetize Youtube. If ads can be sold without those ids, Instagram and Youtube could have grown on their won.

Is this an emperor's clothing situation and nobody talks about this or do I have a complete misunderstanding of ad technology?

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> Isn't Gmail the core pillar of Google's ad network?

Absolutely. GMail is the main reason people are logged into their Google account all the time on their computers and mobile devices. It is absolutely essential for tracking.

Plus they can ... read your emails? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28631732

I'd say it's more about attachments: invoices, receipts, anything with purchases and/or financial info.

In most cases the same information you can glean from someone’s email inbox, you can likely glean the same accuracy by looking at their google search history.

I would guess Google doesn’t read emails because the data is more difficult to parse (there’s a lot of it) and, when compared to intent based interests that can be gleaned from your google searches, the value of the content in your inbox is lower than most people think.

They could but claim they don't, and I don't think anyone has proven otherwise. Hard to make money from something you're not actually doing.

I assume they are. Of course I assume if it’s not end to end encrypted it’s not private and is being read or scanned by someone.

i’ve replied above. they claim they do not read your emails.

regarding encryption i’ve only found this:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6330403?hl=en#zippy=%...

> Email encryption in transit S/MIME is used to support enhanced encryption in transit, and automatically encrypts your outgoing emails if it can.

> Important: These steps only work if you have S/MIME enabled on your account

End-to-end encryption with keys only you control is really the only type that matters from a privacy point of view. Encryption at rest or in transit behind the scenes helps protect against some actors but does not give you privacy.

The zero-setup encryption offered by cloud providers is also smoke and mirrors. It's a key they control, so while it may improve security against someone internal snooping on a raw SAN device it doesn't do much for your privacy.

Well yes they do. Even spam filtering needs them to read the emails. But they claim they don't use emails for advertising.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10434152?hl=en

> We do not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads If you have a work or school account, you will never be shown ads in Gmail.

> When you use your personal Google account and open the promotions or social tabs in Gmail, you'll see ads that were selected to be the most useful and relevant for you. The process of selecting and showing personalized ads in Gmail is fully automated. These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google, however we do not process email content to serve ads.

What about the meta data?

I know a company that once worked on an unannounced product, X, a few years ago. At the time, you could Google "who made X," and Google would correctly show you that company. It was a start-up size business using GSuite, so far too unlikely to be a lucky guess by Google.

This caused no damage as the public needed to know what X was to Google it, and it was unannounced. But it was suspicious. Either Google was scanning GSuite Gmail or Drive accounts, or perhaps someone stored a document on or sent an email to a personal Google account with some keywords. How these things happen is always very opaque with companies like Google.

Our maybe an internal page was accidentally externally accessible, someone internal visited it in Chrome, and the URL got added to the list of things to scrape.

I've see this without Gsuite vector. Could be employees logged in to personal device and leaking through those interactions. Or email to external investors, consultants, or contractors? Send something out to your external translation or localization team, ad agency, or copy editor? Difficult not to have some leakage.

All of these could be true. However, the start-up was using GSuite a lot. It constituted about 90% of the company's interactions with Google. It's impossible to certainly know what happened since Google can't be asked where it got its data.

Why not link to the top level story? I have the top reply on that story, that links to some support links explaining it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28632012

To add, I believe they have since turned that future down.

> Whoever is logged into Gmail tells Google who is using an IP address.

Google already has most people's IP address through search. Google is just providing free email because they want control, and I am willing to bet that it would be very hard to make profit, both direct or indirect, through gmail.

Without the Google login, Google has a bunch of 32-bit numbers from people’s search activity. With gmail, they now know a lot more about what’s behind those 32-bit numbers.

How many billions does Google pay Apple to be the default search? How about email?

Search > email, though I think they're both pillars.

They don’t have to pay anyone to use Gmail. People prefer gmail and seek it out themselves.

They may be paying to be the first option in "choose your email provider" lists. Although Apple's Mail.app (both iOS and macOS) offers their own and Microsoft's services before Google's.

For Google, the easiest way to gain new GMail users is to not deliver mail coming to existing users from 3rd party services or to throw it into trash/spam folders for no reason.

That option should be standard unless Apple wants an DOJ/EU antitrust case against them.

It sounds like you're describing using emails to target/personalize ads, which they don't do?

The data from Gmail isn't what's valuable to Google, it's the fact that targeted ads are more profitable and Google can target you with ads accurately because you logged in and identified yourself to access Gmail.

I’m describing using telemetry correlating which IP addresses/devices have used specific gmail accounts, nothing to do with the contents of those emails.

The gmail account just as a correlation ID has a ton of value in search.

Let's remember that Gmail opened the door for Google to become the default identity provider for many people. A lot of consumer and behavioral data can be inferred from every service account tied via OAuth to google.

Were you searching for homes to buy? You'll probably use your google account. Bought a couple of home automation devices, cameras, and doorbells? Chances are you are using a google login.

Use Waze in your car? Now google knows what car you drive and the places where you go and can tie it nicely with all other pieces of data because you are using your google account.

This is invaluable for them. From your usage of a google account, they can infer your family arrangements, probably what your job is, your income and wealth level, tastes and habits.

>Instagram and Youtube could have grown on their

Hadn't they grown on their own before they got bought up?

They had potential but were not making money nor had a visible path to monetization.

YouTube was about to be sued into oblivion and even if they weren’t, they were hemorrhaging money with no revenue stream in sight

Google did make money providing email for one of my companies with G Suite. Then something screwed up happened that disrupted service, their support was worse than useless, and I will never pay for any non-advertising Google product ever again.

what happened? My experience with GSuite support has been great.

I've also had adverse experiences with GSuite support tbh.

Basically account recovery is next to impossible. If your GSuite admin fucks up somehow and gets locked out, good luck getting back in lol.

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