
Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads - ahiknsr
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-23/google-will-stop-reading-your-emails-for-gmail-ads
======
jikeo
I know I shouldn't be surprised, but it seems weird that the reporter nor any
of the 140+ comments so far seemingly don't mention the recently published
proposal for a new ePrivacy directive in the EU that will make it a lot harder
for Google to scan e-mails in the first place.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-privacy-
idUSKBN14U1FL](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-privacy-idUSKBN14U1FL)
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/10/whatsapp-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/10/whatsapp-
facebook-google-privacy-rules-ec-european-directive)
[http://www.kemplittle.com/site/articles/kl_bytes/the-
draft-e...](http://www.kemplittle.com/site/articles/kl_bytes/the-draft-
eprivacy-regulation10-things-you-need-to-know)

~~~
chicob
That directive might be related to what's happening.

But let's not be naive: if Google will stop reading our emails in order to
send us personalized ads, that's because it doesn't really need to. People
share just enough outside their email environment for Google to do its thing.
Another sign of which those worrying about privacy should be aware.

~~~
roganp
Or, maybe: the extra information gleaned from reading your emails is just not
that valuable. Not because they have this via other means, but its just not
that valuable, period - whether it comes from reading emails or scrutinizing
your browser history. We like to imagine that if advertisers knew enough about
us, they'd be able to direct our spending, but I think that is far from true.

~~~
piaste
I'm pretty sure scrutinizing your browser history is still extremely valuable.
But I find it quite plausible that email _in particular_ has lost value as
marketing information.

People still use email for all kinds of business, of course. But their day-to-
day personal activities, the kind that marketers care about ("I've taken up
kayaking!", "I'm pregnant!") don't usually show up in emails any more, they
get posted on social media.

~~~
gub09
This makes sense. Possibly the value of increased corporate sales of G Suite
is worth more than the loss of the information gained from reading diminishing
numbers of personal emails, as people turn more and more to social media and
phone apps for personal communication.

------
skrause
I never understood the argument that some automatic scanning for keywords is
like "reading" your mail. By that same logic isn't Gmail's spam filter still
"reading" your mail? It is classifying your mail based on content after all...

~~~
dingaling
It's like my accountant reading my receipts to create my tax return versus a
sleazy salesman sneaking a peek at them to find new ways to sell me stuff.

~~~
cybrjoe
It's more like your accountant preparing your tax return for free in exchange
for aggregating data about your receipts and offering you goods and services
you may be interested in.

~~~
ouid
Let's split the difference. It's like your accountant preparing your tax
return in exchange for using that tax return to develop a model of your
spending habits. The value of this model is more than the cost of them doing
your tax returns, and in fact is such that if you were simply to collect that
data yourself, sell it on the open market, and spend a portion of the proceeds
on the tax prep service, you would end up with profit, and the tax prep
service would still exist.

~~~
dmix
> The value of this model is more than the cost of them doing your tax returns

It's likely the value Google got out of scanning your email wasn't worth that
much in terms of modelling profiles for ads.

Probably because having both your search history and "anonymized" Google
analytics, plus the sea of data that comes from owning Android is more than
enough data that Google/Doubleclick needs.

From a purely capitalist perspective I'd bet the utility of them scraping this
data no longer outweighs the privacy costs.

But at the same time Google is still scanning attachments for child porn and
likely other data out of national security interests. And they still can
access your data on a case-by-case basis which from a FISA perspective is a
rubber-stamp away from accessing your data from 2 hops away from someone who
may or may not have done something bad.

I personally will not weigh using Google vs any other email service in terms
of privacy any different after this measure. But I still appreciate their
efforts to reduce the "standard pratice" nature of scanning private email. If
I do use anything Google-related I will not associate my personal identity in
any way with the service, which is still requirement for Google play.

You can still use a fake gmail account and prepaid Google gift cards bought
with cash to disassociate your identity from using the service. Although
that's still well beyond the investment the majority of people are willing to
make.

Regardless privacy comes at a cost these days. Good OPSEC > trusting cloud
services privacy policy. You can either not use the services or invest in
protecting your data when using them.

I will still cheer on Google's efforts to make those of us who care about
privacy live's easier. I'm not naive enough to ignore how their business model
works but that doesn't mean they always have to take the easy route and hand
everything over without considering the costs - as many ISP/Telecom companies
seem to do.

~~~
mrybczyn
Eh? That assumption of "not associating my personal identity" doesn't actually
work. Your profile IS your personal identity, and can be associated trivially.
If not algorithmically, then via one connecting piece of information supplied
by various databases and no such agencies. You're living in a dream.

~~~
dmix
> Your profile IS your personal identity, and can be associated trivially.

I'm hardly new to his stuff and to say it's trivial is nonsense. Most people
make it trivial but it's not trivial to associate identities of people who put
basic effort into obscuring them.

Merely disconnecting your primary profiles from your online activity is enough
to throw most mass-surveillance/drag-net stuff off, aka 99.9% of advertising
firms and most government programs.

If you're an activist or someone interested in keeping your internet activity
private then the bar is far higher (and the targets of which are ever
expanding as governments and private organizations get better at this stuff).
FBI agents, or likewise in your country of residence, have plenty of forensic
tools at their disposal to connect disparate identities. It takes some real
time investment and requires being super careful to evade these measures. But
I'm not talking about that here. I mean the average person in 2017.

I've personally done the total anonymity stuff as an experiment so I know what
that takes.

Having studied many documents from the various global national security
organizations and being fortunate to have dated a defense attorney in the past
who engaged with police surveillance reports on a daily basis for their work
I'm convinced that even basic privacy measures such as never using your real
identity when using internet services, creating full legitimate sounding
backstories (and subsequent online profiles) for your fake identity, and
changing the ID you use often enough will throw off most basic surveillance
measures.

I'm not doing anything to get people really invested in uncovering my online
identities, as most people aren't, which is what I'm talking about.

The simple fact is the vast, vast majority of people reuse the same username
(and passwords) across the internet and use their real name and emails
everywhere. So it's really not hard to track people online from an LEO or
4chan doxxing perspective.

But I'm not convinced you have to be isolated from the utility of most online
(cloud) services. You just have to invest in using them intelligently to not
associate your actual identity with the services.

Ad companies aren't interested in deanonymizing people anyway. They are
looking for low hanging fruit and there are more than enough people to fill
databases who fit this profile. So I'm not that concerned about those who
don't.

~~~
mcbits
It's not trivial to match any arbitrary profile with an offline identity, but
it is possible to cluster pseudonymous profiles into "almost certainly the
same individual" by patterns and peculiarities in how they use their devices.
If the same patterns later show up for an identified user, they can be linked
with high probability.

With the sites Google runs plus running their own JavaScript on a sizable
fraction of other people's web pages, they can pick up a lot of patterns, many
of which would be inaccessible to police and intelligence surveillance.

Some people have nervous habits like moving the mouse around, clicking/tapping
on whitespace, scrolling up and down, etc. Some always/never use the
scrollbar. Some always/never open links in new tabs. Some tend to put the
adjective before/after the noun in their searches. Some will rapidly open up
the first 5 search results in new tabs. Some always disable instant search,
and some of those change their settings to 20 or 50 or 100 results. Some use
search features like the calculator, searching for "weather", stock symbols,
etc, and others never do.

------
vaishaksuresh
I very recently switched to fastmail and couldn't be happier. For $90 a year,
I don't have to deal with people snooping and tracking me around for ads. I
know google is trying to give me value with all their facial recognition and
recommendations, but I don't think it is going to end well. When it does end
badly, it will be too late for the user because we would've given up all the
data. I don't want Google to build models to track my toddler's face when he
isn't even capable of consenting to such tracking.

~~~
DerfNet
Is there any reason not to go with ProtonMail? They seem to be the big
recommendation lately for encrypted email service.

~~~
Propen
I'd really love to support ProtonMail but one thing I can't swallow is that
there's no server-side search of email bodies (only to/from & subject) because
it's encrypted. This kills the possibility of searching through years of
newsletters & stuff :/

~~~
jszymborski
[I'm stupid they have 2FA, ignore this comment.]

Another huge problem is the lack of two-factor authentication. How can a
security-oriented service not offer TOTP or even SMS 2FA.

~~~
stockmania
2FA has been out for almost 6 months.

~~~
jszymborski
Oops, my Google-fu is worse than I thought.

------
myrandomcomment
So this never really bugged me. It is a damn good free service. I also love
how it picks up on plane tickets, hotel reservations, etc and puts them in the
calendar. Makes life simpler.

If ad companies fix something please fix the I searched for something and
bought it but I get adds for it for the next 4 weeks. That bugs me.

~~~
aembleton
Frustratingly, by reading my emails Google should know that I've bought
something and so don't need ads about it.

But hey, they don't seem to have used that data.

~~~
everythingswan
At that point, it's on the advertiser. It's a weird dynamic where they want to
enable the advertiser to factor that in and not advertise to you _, but they
want to maximize rev and imperfect advertisers increases rev.

(_ = edit for grammar)

------
kentosi
I don't understand why there isn't an option for me to pay for Google to
remove ads from gmail.

I've already paid for Youtube Red and couldn't be happier.

~~~
SN76477
[https://gsuite.google.com/products/gmail/](https://gsuite.google.com/products/gmail/)

About $60 a year

I have about 8 accounts that I use.

~~~
joosters
This hardly frees you from Google's data gathering. They will have records of
your IP address used to collect the emails and your access history, so they
know (roughly) where you live, what times of day you are active, and can
probably infer stuff like when you are on holiday. If you are in the same
house as someone else, they probably use Google too and the shared IP address
lets Google tie the two identities together. So they get to discover your
relationships too.

~~~
askvictor
So will any host. When you are paying for it though, the terms of service
clearly define what is collected and what it's used for, and you can choose to
enable or disable that type of data matching

------
newscracker
<rant> Slightly off topic: I was very annoyed that this article didn't provide
any links to Google's official statement/declaration about this change and
when it's coming. Even if Bloomberg interviewed Diane Green for this article
or asked questions and got official statements, it could've still provided an
official link for the change. </rant>

I found the link [1] here on HN.

[1]: [https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-
in...](https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in-the-
enterprise-g-suites-gmail-and-consumer-gmail-to-more-closely-align/)

------
jmull
I should probably get fitted for a tinfoil hat because my immediate reaction
was, "Oh shit! They must've developed something now that tracks you better and
is less obvious."

~~~
eatbitseveryday
My educated guess would be that given the proliferation of services offered by
Google, it indeed has many more sources of information on each individual, and
having email as one of them perhaps proves less beneficial today as it did
when Gmail was first introduced. Now there is the Android OS which gives
information about apps you use, locations, activities, and online searches,
map queries, bookmarks, sentiments via G+, etc. So, it can disable auto-
scanning of emails perhaps as a PR move (or, should I hope it is going to
eventually evolve its email service to include encrypting emails, and this is
one step in that direction??).

~~~
icebraining
The article explains it plainly: they weren't getting the message to business
people that Gmail on Google Apps _isn 't_ scanned despite free Gmail being, so
they stopped scanning Gmail altogether.

~~~
dsp1234
_stopped scanning Gmail altogether._

Note that this is not what the article says. It says that they stopped
scanning Gmail for _ads_ , but does not say they stopped scanning email for
non-ad purposes.

~~~
chippy
To be more accurate the article says they stopped scanning for ads that appear
_inside gmail_. Whether they still scan emails in the free gmail for use
_outside_ gmail is unknown, but I may be being pedantic...

~~~
joshuamorton
(disclosure, I work on gmail, although nothing related to ads)

I can't find a citation, but I'm fairly confident that that's never been the
case. Ad targeting from emails has always been siloed to within gmail. To
quote the post:

>Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads
personalization after this change.

That's pretty unequivocal.

~~~
chippy
Thanks!

------
WisNorCan
This most likely is a pragmatic financial decision. Contextual advertising is
generating a lower CPM than data/person based advertising.

Said differently the relevance that can be extracted from your specific email
is less than the cumulative knowledge that Google has about you from other
sources.

~~~
elsewhen
Gmail ads were no just contextual. Advertisers were able to target people who
received email from a particular domain. Can you imagine the power of being
able to target customers of a competitor that has been developing their
customer relationships for years?

This is 100% conjecture, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was this domain
targeting (which is what many advertisers were using) that was the thing that
Google's big clients were complaining about.

------
drusepth
Will there still be a way to opt-in?

This seems like one of those decisions that is a net negative for
functionality in favor of quelling some misguided privacy concerns. Hopefully
this doesn't lessen the quality of ads by much.

~~~
bootlooped
This is the first time I've ever heard a person worry about the quality of the
ads that are served to them.

~~~
crazygringo
I've often wondered why nobody brings this up more.

If you're going to see ads for things, why on earth _wouldn 't_ you want them
to try to better target you? The whole point is for you to find out about
things that might be useful for you.

Why would I want less of the useful things? Why would I want worse
advertising?

~~~
hrktb
I think some people make the assumption they are targeted for products that
might be beneficial for them. But why would that mostly be the case ? Someone
with an online shopping problem would be a perfect target for a flurry of ads,
and getting better targeted ads would just be screwing that person more and
more.

Even in a saner scenario, the most informative ad you can imagine will still
isolate you from the information you would have got by doing your own
research. But since you have most of the information you wanted to have, you
won't bother checking that much more.

IMO even in the best case scenario, helping people to be lazy on things they
are interested in is counterproductive in the long term.

------
VMG
Hope this increases the chance of E2E encryption

~~~
JumpCrisscross
How would you search your inbox? Or filter spam?

~~~
mtgx
[https://protonmail.com/blog/encrypted-email-spam-
filtering/](https://protonmail.com/blog/encrypted-email-spam-filtering/)

I remember there was a recent paper that dealt with this, too, but I can't
find it right now. But it basically demolished this argument that it's
impossible to stop spam if the email is encrypted.

~~~
jcranmer
That blog post doesn't actually say anything about how they do spam filtering
on encrypted emails. Everything they talk about is bog-standard spam
filtering, including comparing against known spam and Bayesian filtering, both
of which are impossible to do on encrypted emails. It's not clear if they're
doing reputation analysis, which is the other big anti-spam measure impossible
on encrypted email (I suspect it's the main component of their "we're not
telling you what we're doing"). The SPF/DKIM/DMARC and blacklist checks are
the only things you can reliably do on encrypted email.

They do say "In future blog posts, we will cover the challenges of preventing
ProtonMail from being used by spammers and the challenges of doing spam
filtering with end-to-end encrypted emails which we cannot read", but I can't
find any such blog posts.

------
robbart90
"The decision didn’t come from Google’s ad team, but from its cloud unit,
which is angling to sign up more corporate customers."

Interesting timing with the story earlier this week about Wal-Mart telling
vendors to stop using AWS

------
cm2012
That sucks for me as an advertiser. Gmail ads were great for B2B marketing.

~~~
wand3r
Man I am super sorry my basic privacy are getting in the way of your marketing
effort.

Edit: removed "rights"

~~~
robotresearcher
Google can't read your post office mail. It can't read your Yahoo mail. But
you certainly have no right that says it can't read your Gmail mail.

You're confusing a want with a right.

------
sidcool
Google will still show ads in Gmail, just not based on email contents.

------
kolemcrae
Interesting - as an advertiser I generally recommend using the email address
"sent from" as your main source of targeting but combining that with specific
keywords within the gmail campaign can be super helpful at finding people at
the exact right time.

~~~
shostack
Yeah, targeting competitor domain names tends to perform pretty well. Do you
know if domain targeting is disappearing with this update?

------
hilyen
Good for them. Though it goes without saying email is insecure. If enterprise
clients dislike an algorithm scanning their email contents, maybe they should
also consider that email generally has unencrypted transit and storage.

~~~
bitJericho
Very few servers store/transmit emails unencrypted...

~~~
icebraining
Not that few - more than 1 in 10 emails sent and received by Gmail are
unencrypted:
[https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/saferemail/](https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/saferemail/)

~~~
bitJericho
That's higher than I would have expected. The question though, is who is not
allowing encrypted emails? I wonder if it's mostly just China.

~~~
netheril96
Looking at the data
([https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/saferemail/#region...](https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/saferemail/#region=142)).
The major Chinese players QQ and 163 do employ TLS, while the worst offenders
of security are mostly Japanese.

The Chinese government can just ask QQ and 163 for your email such that they
don't need to see it in transit. Less work, too.

------
neves
It basically means that they already track so much information about you that
they don't need to monitor the contents of your email anymore.

Now Google knows: \- all your searches (know your interests), \- a great
percentage of the pages you visit (ads and analytics) \- all your contacts and
how frequently you connect to them (metadata in gmail) \- the places you visit
(geolocation in Android) \- Google logins (know the sites that interest you
the most)

Your email contents is completely unecessary.

------
aaln
Title should be: Google Will Stop Using Your Email Data for Gmail Ads.

------
stubish
Not scanning emails for ads? Corporate business?

I wonder if Google will be pushing end-to-end email encryption? They have
already had some experiments on it.

They have the majority browser, they have the lions share of email hosting. It
they played their cards right, they could claim the entire email ecosystem,
except for the small portion who won't use Google products on principle. The
questions would be would 3rd party clients be allowed, and how would Apple
fight it.

Or maybe this is all just a smoke screen to sucker dumb corps. In the existing
architecture, your emails still need to be scanned so they can be indexed for
search. You could get the same result scanning these indexes as scanning the
emails themselves, so from a privacy perspective it could be a non-event.

------
jshelly
And I am in the middle of migrating to icloud from google. Not going to stop
at this point.

~~~
erikb
Not sure if sarcasm or serious stupidity. Please clarify.

~~~
jshelly
neither, serious, why?

You seem to comment frequently here on HN where I consider most users to be
above average in the level of intelligent replies so your trolling seems quite
out of place.

------
davb
But will they stop using Hangouts IM content for customer segmentation? I
probably say much more relevant things in Hangouts (from a marketing
perspective) than in email.

------
geekme
I will never use a enterprise google product unless they have customer
support. The customer support team should have humans and not robots.

~~~
Xorlev
Enterprise customers have support. It's not as feasible in the consumer space,
the volume would be overwhelming.

------
prirun
My guess is that with Google Drive, they are getting way more information on
individuals and companies than they ever got via email.

------
Overtonwindow
I think I've become jaded because I just don't believe it. It's like Google
Home. A wonderful device but when I heard it may start listening to everything
I say... I just figured yeah, that should be expected. So now I just expect
Google to read, listen, and analyze everything I do with their products.

~~~
okreallywtf
Maybe I don't understand google home because I don't have one, but to be able
to detect whatever keywords cause it to listen to you doesn't it have to
listen to everything you say?

I feel like any device that has a microphone is suspect if you want total
privacy, but listening to what you say seems like an integral part of the
device. You can only hope (and independently verify) that they don't _store_
everything you say.

~~~
huehehue
It's my understanding that there's a low power, always-on service listening
for stuff like "Alexa"/"OK Google", and only when it hears a keyword does it
start "listening" and sending data back for parsing/processing.

I could be wrong and/or they could be lying about how the product really
works. Could probably monitor your network traffic if you really wanted to
find out.

------
chaitime
What happens to the data that was already collected. Legally they can still
use that data right?

------
m-p-3
But they'll most likely read them for another purpose, for example training
their AI.

------
mozzarella
I wonder what the conversion rates on these within-client ads are. I know I've
never opened any no matter how well-targeted or 'interesting' the ads were,
because the immediate response is to just want to sweep the inbox clean.

------
chenster
Even though it never really bothered me because Apple Mail does not pull
anything but the actual email message from Gmail, so I never see them, I still
would like G to stop scanning anything personal. Period.

------
MarkMc
OK but will Google stop reading my email for _other_ types of ads?

For example, if I write "I love coffee" in an email, am I more likely to see a
Starbucks ad when I visit watch a YouTube video?

~~~
kolemcrae
Wee yeah - it says they will no longer scan emails.... Instead they will use
your youtube data, search data, website visit data etc.

~~~
CobrastanJorji
In addition, I suspect, given that every time you walk into a Starbucks your
phone is probably connecting to the network "Google Starbucks", that they
probably know how you feel about coffee.

------
daveheq
Actually I'd prefer they did so they can optimize their cash flow and my
targeted ads so I can continue using their free product and all it's nice
features without any compromise.

------
ziikutv
Some of my emails are "read" (as in shown as I have read them) when I have
literally just received them. Is this referring to the same thing?

------
nerdiiee
How many of you have successfully prevented Google and Facebook for tracking
your web habits ? What all steps do you take to prevent the tracking ?

------
RichLewis007
It's about time! I wonder if this is due to the fact that if email encryption
becomes common, the content will be inaccessible to Google anyway.

~~~
eli
I doubt it. That's a pretty big "if".

~~~
Spivak
If they're not using it for ads, there's a good chance that it's in Google's
best interest to not know the contents of people's email. It lessens the
impact of a potential breach, and it greatly simplifies their responses to
gov't requests to 'we have no method to access this data, you must contact the
account holder directly'.

~~~
netheril96
And then Google gets inundated from angry customers who forget their password
or key for the encryption of their emails.

------
tkubacki
Is free Outlook account scanning me email or for building ads profile or for
any other purpose ?

------
redthrowaway
I suspect that means they no longer need to, and have better ways of targeting
ads at you.

------
rzr
Title is misleading, it should be G will keep reading your emails except for G
Ads.

------
nachtigall
Seriously, there's private, ad-free mail for 1$ a months:
[https://posteo.de/en/](https://posteo.de/en/) or
[https://mailbox.org/en/](https://mailbox.org/en/)

------
mavhc
Wonder if it's also a move that will help encrypted email become supported

------
hkmurakami
Won't people keep assuming gmail reads their emails at this point though?

------
andrepd
How do you know? That's the problem with closed source software, and software
that runs in someone else's computer. You have no idea what it does. You
aren't in control. Someone else is deciding what code runs on your computer.
That's a problem.

~~~
mrisoli
Big companies can't hide this stuff forever, you can eventually figure out, it
is just better business-wise for them to just state they read your emails for
ads, it can cost them a lot if they don't, plus most people don't really care.

A few weeks ago a friend and I were talking exclusively through WhatsApp about
a trip to London(in Portuguese with our very unusual jargon), I didn't do any
search for anything related it was all within our conversation, a couple days
later Facebook had a post on my timeline saying: "heading to London? Check
what your friends did there".

I don't remember reading anywhere that WhatsApp reads your conversations for
ads, but it was clear to me that's where they got the information, it was
spooky at first.

~~~
MajesticHobo
WhatsApp doesn't read your conversations for ads because it can't. Message
content is end-to-end encrypted. You must have leaked your plans through some
other medium inadvertently.

~~~
sedachv
This is called retargeting and is even worse from a privacy perspective: now
your data is going through multiple layers of ad buying tools, analytics, ad
exchanges, aggregators, ad networks, etc.: [http://2bd2y2367xnj3kpntjsifzmf-
wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-c...](http://2bd2y2367xnj3kpntjsifzmf-
wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/LUMA-Display-Ad-Tech-
Landscape-for-AdExchanger.jpg)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_retargeting)

------
ChuckMcM
It was interesting (but I suppose a random bit) that after reading this
article a new email showed up in my gmail inbox that was spam. I wonder if
this isn't the first move in a plan to create a 'pay' gmail service for
individuals.

------
ForFreedom
So what method have they adopted to display adverts in emails?

~~~
wdr1
It's literally in the article.

------
hellbanner
But they will still track links you click from gmail.com ?

------
rasz
Will they also stop tracking clicked links in gmail?

------
LeoNatan25
Almost as if they want to do no evil. Almost.

------
itiman
The fact of reading emails for ads is disputable even if it's used for a new
purpose, YT.

~~~
itiman
HAL: Ads will continue to appear inside the free version of Gmail, as promoted
messages. But instead of scanning a user’s email, the ads will now be targeted
with other personal information Google already pulls from sources such as
search and YouTube.

------
mrmondo
Too little, too late IMO

------
Markoff
Thank you EU.

------
Kluny
Gosh, thanks.

------
nether
Switch to Protonmail.

------
Lambent
To be clear, Google is not saying they'll stop reading your emails, only that
your emails' contents won't be used to generate ad content.

------
TheChosen
Quite obviously Google feels their profiling of users from other sources is
good enough that they can afford to throw them a bone - not to mention save
themselves a bit of effort since they will no longer need to maintain two
systems for GMail.

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megamindbrian
Their AI knows what you are thinking anyways. The singularity is here!!

------
Manager
Well this is an interesting turn of events.

I wasn't expecting this from a company that makes most of it's revenue through
advertising. Sets a cautiously positive precedent.

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funnyfacts365
Oh, the doublespeak... They will read your emails for everything else, like
Google Now, just not to show you ads. ahahahahahahahah

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fernyherrera
word

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rootsudo
How nice of Google.

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flavor8
Fine. Can they please make Google Apps users first class users in the google
ecosystem?

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ethanpil
Does that mean that Google now has no more use for Gmail, and soon millions of
people will be scrambling to cover yet another product sunset?

That would certainly cause an enormous loss of goodwill, but.... imagine this
scenario:

Google has some slow growth quarters, they need to keep the numbers up for
shareholders. They start to examine what they can squeeze. Gmail costs them X
(hundreds?) millions per year, but doesn't gain much from it...

Certainly its unlikely, as it is also a SSO tool, etc. Still....

~~~
kingbirdy
Considering gmail is a major part of google apps as well, I imagine they're
making plenty of money off of it

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mtgx
So much for the argument "how else is Google going to make money if it isn't
reading your emails?!"

Companies can make money without tracking you 24/7 and reading all of your
private content. They just choose not to, because it's easier, and then spread
the propaganda that those things are "needed" to stay in business.

~~~
JeremyBanks
Google can stop reading your emails _because_ they track you so well you
elsewhere. You wouldn't want to cite this example.

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patkai
Google will stop reading my emails for Gmail ads because I will stop using
Gmail. It's kind of a sad story, because they are the good guys, but once they
built a huge company they started to focus on maintaining it, possibly at any
cost. This is a cautionary tale: power corrupts. You, me, everyone. And yes,
the web will produce dictators we never imagined possible, because the
Internet is so powerful it will enable them.

~~~
sqeaky
I agree that the web is extremely powerful.

I also think this power is symmetric in who it enables. Unlike land ownership
or TV broadcasting entry isn't expensive and the needed tools can easily be
smuggled. Anyone can easily gain immensely from this free-flowing font of
knowledge and communication.

A potential dictator must take great pains to use gain that huge power in the
Internet era and I think you are right that we will see some insanely powerful
dictators. However, I think we see fewer than in previous eras though.

------
siliconc0w
I think there is some interesting middle ground where you could use machine
learning to go from 'show only relevant ads' to 'show only ads you might
actually click on with greater than .001 probability'. I guess this is like
'extreme' outlier detection but it'd be interesting to see what revenue the
ads at the 'long tail' of likelihood generate anyway. My guess the bulk of it
is from the standard high CPC stuff like Mortages and Insurance. Google says
it does this but i'm not too sure - I've never intentionally clicked an adword
and yet they're still shown to me.

Anyway this may solve the tragedy of the commons situation we're in now and
allow us to move away from the technology war of ad blockers, ad blocker
blockers, ad blocker blocker blockers, etc.

edit: removed comment on clarity of Gsuite vs Free due to downvote brigade.

~~~
gpribeiro
> Paying Gmail users never received the email-scanning ads like the free
> version of the program, but some business customers were confused by the
> distinction and its privacy implications, said Diane Greene, Google’s senior
> vice president of cloud.

Google doesn't read e-mails from GSuite. So the change is to stop reading from
Gmail's free accounts.

------
4684499
I'm fine to let them scan my emails for spam filter, yet they use it as an
excuse to justify their data collection and other things they do with my data,
which is unacceptable for me. How would I know if they are going to do things
against my interests one day? Ads targeting is already against mine.

I used to see Google as a stalker. How naive I was. There are billions of
people being stalked, exploited, and the whole process is automated. It comes
to me that users are not victims of stalking, they are lab rats.

Now Google stopped reading emails for ads, but they'll still read for other
purposes, which still makes me as a user feel insecure. I value my privacy, I
have my dignity, I shouldn't be a lab rat that they can just observe however
they want only because they provide free cheese.

Even if I start using a paid account to stop them from reading my emails
(assume paid account with better privacy protection is possible), I couldn't
stop them from reading others'. Stopping the data collection of one user won't
change the situation, they still have other lab rats' data they could collect
and analyze, which enables them to learn or predict other rats' behaviors.

The worst thing is, Google is not the only company doing this right now.
Surveillance technologies are developing, it's like every data company has
grown their teeth and become more thirsty for blood.

Edit: words.

