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Comment by wodenokoto

7 years ago

> And then I would be _very_ surprised if google doesn't use the content of your emails for advertisement and tracking purposes.

That would go against their own privacy policy. But they are one change away from doing it.

11 comments

wodenokoto

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garmaine  7 years ago

Really? When gmail came out they were explicitly up front about using the content of the email to deliver targeted ads. Has that changed?

  • riquito  7 years ago

    There are a lot of misinformations around, and the Google haters crowd has plenty of pitchforks.

    https://safety.google/privacy/ads-and-data/

    > Google does not use keywords or messages in your inbox to show you ads. Nobody reads your email in order to show you ads.

    • alxlaz  7 years ago

      It's just the passage of time that has rendered it misinformation. Until not so long ago, Gmail messages were actually scanned for ads -- IIRC, Google was actually pretty upfront about it when they first launched Gmail, and explained that it's how they could afford to give users 1G of inbox space in a day and age where 25 MB was pretty good and 100 MB was pretty hard to get for free.

      They eventually stopped, although the phrasing of the privacy policy is vague enough that, as wodenokoto mentions above, I wouldn't be surprised if email messages were still scanned for some advertising purposes. The fragment on the page you link to is only about ads shown in Gmail, doesn't exclude using keywords and messages for tracking, classifying etc. (it just doesn't use them "to show you ads") and doesn't actually exclude using programs to process messages (i.e. you can still reasonably say that "nobody reads" messages if you just feed them into a program). It's also not very obvious if "messages in your inbox" also includes messages you send.

      FWIW, I think the policy is deliberately open-ended so as to be future-proof, but I doubt emails are an important source of advertising data today, so I think it's likely that Google doesn't rely on it that much anymore. Most sources of legitimate (i.e. non-spam email) that are useful for advertising -- e.g. online shops and the like -- already track you and show you ads, and Google is already deeply embedded there. Millions and millions of personal accounts are an useful strategic asset to have but I think there are better sources of data.

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    • megous  7 years ago

      Depends on what they mean by messages? The whole raw message, incl. all headers? The text user sees?

      Google can probably serve nice ads just based on metadata it gathers on the SMTP level, without even using the raw message. Someone mails his bank, maybe show some banking related e-mails, etc.

      And it would still stay true to the proclamation on that page.

    • away_throw  7 years ago

      Are we sure about this? When I downloaded my Google data, I fished around and found information related to my Amazon purchase history and etcetera. The only possible way that I can think of that Google is able to get my purchase data is from my email.

    • BeetleB  7 years ago

      That's not misinformation - it's just mildly dated information. Google stopped scanning emails for ads very recently.

      It was never a conspiracy theory. Google used to be very open about the fact that they were scanning emails.