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Comment by glerk | Hacker News Reader

I just can't stand how Gmail is putting a red line under every other sentence that I write (telling me that my writing style is a "mistake") and aggressively nudging me to rewrite it to make it sound more like AI.

Whoever thought such a product would be a good idea should be fired.

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Grammar suggestions off

Spelling suggestions off

Writing suggestions off (probably the one you want)

Yup, I was just giving them "thumbs down" on every suggestion, but I know I am screaming into the void.

But the fact that this feature exists in its current form (opt-out) means that nobody who tested it internally had the balls to just say "this is fundamentally the wrong direction, we should probably not do this". Don't be evil teehee.

I get the blue squiggly underline with suggestions on how I can improve what I write. I bet if I open up two drafts it will happily suggest contradictory improvements on it's own suggestions.

I'm starting to develop a squiggly line blindness, so be it if grammar in my email suffers :)

Out of interest - do you trust google reading all your emails? What do you think about privacy?

95% of the people I interact with over email are on Gmail (or Outlook). Google/Microsoft still have those emails either way, even if I switch off.

I used to care, but I don't anymore. They can read my emails, my code, track what websites I visit and what music I listen to, be my guest. I'd let them read my thoughts directly if we can build technology to do that lol. I realized that ultimately, these corporations are too stupid to do anything of value with all that data, so I don't feel threatened.

The danger isn't that they'll do anything of value; the danger is that they'll do something stupid with your data.

You're probably right, I'm an idiot. I just think there's not much we can do about it, so might as well not take it too seriously. At least for the innocuous type of surveillance like reading my emails to learn how to sell me product. Things that you really want to keep for yourself shouldn't really touch the internet at all.

This doesn't strike me as "reading" your emails any more than a router is "reading" your packets when it forwards them. As far as I know, Google employees (even high-ranking ones) can't randomly start going through people's messages-- that's the privacy that matters.

No but they can train a model to know everything about you and sell it.

They actually have precedence in that as it’s their legacy ad business.

I could absolutely see them getting more proactive with their ad business. Something like mortgage brokers want to know you executed an offer on a new home (high indication you will be shopping for a lender). Then that turn into, your employer wants to know you’re talking to other employers. Then of course there’s many more nefarious examples people would consider more invasive but may not even realize it leaked from their email provider.

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