Google is stopping one of the most controversial advertising formats: ads inside Gmail that scan users’ email contents. The decision didn’t come from Google’s ad team, but from its cloud unit, which is angling to sign up more corporate customers.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud sells a package of office software, called G Suite, that competes with market leader Microsoft Corp. 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. “What we’re going to do is make it unambiguous,” she said.
Good move, and in the current climate, Google really couldn’t continue this practice – automated algorithms or no.
…since moving stuff to my own cloud, never looked back…
Google’s business model is selling real estate on your screen, not your data. I don’t use it for my personal stuff, but I’m OK with it. I’m also a bit biased because I used to work there and people’s privacy was the #1 thing we needed to worry about on our day to day tasks.
The problem is that once they have the data, they can change policies any time, and have years’ worth of data to work with. And then it’s too late to do anything about it.
Fair enough, it’s true.
Same, I now use Fastmail for email and encrypted, paid for cloud storage with a trusted provider for everything else.
I do have to occasionally deal with Gmail when communicating with clients and peers who use it, but it’s all work related. This news makes me happier about being stuck with that situation.
I don’t for a second think Google did this out of kindness. As as user you have to pay for Gmail somehow. If this isn’t by email scanning for targeting ads, it’s something else. My worry is we have no idea what that some thing else is!
Oh yes, that’s exactly my thoughts, too.
This is for paying customers only, so there’s your “something else”. And I think it was done so that corporate customers have one thing less to worry about when using Google, which – in their view – gives them more customers and more money.
It isn’t for paying customers only, but it is because of them.
Lots of business customers didn’t fully grasp or trust that the email scanning was only applied to free accounts, and that paid email wasn’t scanned.
This is just a move to their business customers at ease, by stopping all scanning entirely.
No business in the world does anything out of kindness. Of course they have other revenue sources, and they want as many customers as possible in their ecosystem.
What if you insert large slabs of irrelevant text (eg cut and past or randomly generated) into mails and then send to and from gmail using dummy accounts with other providers?
I assume it would confuse their algorithms.
No, it would just result in you seeing very random and irrelevant ads. Google’s algorithms would not even take notice…
Random and irrelevant ads show that that Google and advertisers are obtaining no useful information. That makes the information totally worthless to both Google and advertisers.
IMO the FAANGs aren’t much more than de facto information miners for governments.
Edited 2017-06-26 09:43 UTC
Again, if you were the only one doing this, neither Google nor advertisers would take notice. The only way that what you’re suggesting could be relevant is if you somehow persuaded millions of people to do the same. And I believe millions of people have better things to do with their time than try to flood Google with irrelevant info.
Also, such behavior on a large scale would be picked up and efficiently filtered by Google’s algorithms in no time, rendering your attempts moot. At worst, it would be a temporary impediment, nothing more serious.
Edited 2017-06-26 10:01 UTC
CATs,
I disagree, google’s whole model relies on getting good information. If users collaborated together to polluting the data collection efforts by google on a large scale (which of course is not the case today), it would deal a significant blow to google and they would not be able to differentiate between legitimate data and fake data. When you have enough people generating misinformation, statistics alone can not differentiate between a fraudulent anomaly versus legitimate trends.
I’d say this would be a viable way to undermine the value of data collection, except that that generating false data on a massive scale would be a tremendous waste of network resources.
Edit: How funny would it be for advertisers to need some kind of captcha technology for their ad networks “Please prove that you are human so that we can deliver your targeted ads”.
Edited 2017-06-26 16:27 UTC
This is fun. It keeps a couple of tabs open to generate random background searches. http://makeinternetnoise.com
Well, if revenue from data mining and ads were to be undermined, I suppose Google could just discontinue free Gmail service and leave only paid option.
You see, the problem here is that you want a free e-mail, but you don’t want service provider to make money of you in any way. Which does not make sense at all. If you don’t want your data to be mined, you go look for paid e-mail. If you don’t want to pay for e-mail, you make your peace with the fact that your data will be used, you will be shown ads etc.
Using a FREE service and complaining about service provider making money by other means is just stupid. You agreed to all that when you signed up and clicked “Agree” under EULA.
CATs,
A lot of my objections with google have to do with the tracking bugs they use without our knowledge. Just when I thought I was blocking all traffic to google, I discovered unexpected traffic on the network going to an unrecognized domain, which turned out to be google’s. The problem is that they’re so ubiquitous and stealthy that it’s easy to be snared without your knowledge and consent.
“Google starts tracking offline shopping”
http://www.osnews.com/comments/29831
The EULA is another point. A few years ago google consolidated it’s terms such that if you wanted to use any of their services, you had to agree to google tracking across all of their services. These kinds of terms are extremely coercive when you just want to use your android device without being tracked.
The truth is the world is getting worse for people who care about privacy.
Edited 2017-06-27 06:54 UTC
Apparently, paid model no longer works in the real world. If it did, there would be much more and much bigger providers offering paid-only services.
Remember all that widespread craze and insane panic when someone spread the gossip that Facebook would move to paid/subscription model? There was so much backlash from users that Facebook even had to put this phrase in big letters on the login/sign-up page: “Free, and always will be”.
Unfortunately, moving back to paid-only services model is no longer a viable business model.
Also, there are quite some paid e-mail services to choose from — why are you still using Gmail and complaining about it?
Edited 2017-06-27 07:42 UTC
Are you aware that you need a gmail account to use Android properly or that many blogs need a gmail/twitter/facebook account to post?
I’d be happy to pay $5/month if I could get a totally anonymous gmail account with no data mining, spyware or backdoors. (I don’t consider g suite an option).
Use FastMail, ProtonMail or any other paid e-mail service instead. Why do you cling to Gmail so much?
CATs,
Just be aware that google itself knows if you are using multiple gmail accounts. Out of the box android and chrome can track you even across 3rd party websites including osnews thanks to adsense and other google trackers unless you take steps to block them.
Edited 2017-06-27 17:25 UTC
I can get a paid email account but I can’t get privacy. I still have to communicate with people who use “free” email or companies who mine my data. So unless I can convince everybody to use a service like Proton Mail (www.protonmail.com) using a paid service is pretty pointless.
You can just disable targeted ads, the effect should be the same.
My idea is about legally sabotaging data harvesting by big corporations.
Edited 2017-06-27 02:32 UTC
unclefester,
Interesting, I didn’t realize such a thing existed, haha.
I just noticed though that the site leaves the referrer intact (http://makeinternetnoise.com/) such that it could easily be blocked/filtered. Nothing a browser plugin couldn’t take care of, but in its current state the websites it navigates to will know what’s up.
A more sophisticated plugin could do more than just hit random pages, it might create plausible human navigation as well.
Edited 2017-06-27 03:00 UTC
Well, big corporations can always go back to subscription model of xx$/month and discontinue all free services. Would that be acceptable for you?
You men like everyone used to do in the early days of the internet? I used my ISP provided email service until 2004. One of my mates only starting using “free” email a few weeks ago. (AFAIK all ISPs still provide basic email service.)
Edited 2017-06-27 08:42 UTC
Exactly. Times have changed considerably since the early days of the Internet. Honestly, if I had to pay for every single service on the internet (Gmail, Facebook, Viber, DropBox, Photo storage, online notes, etc.) I would probably go offline completely. Using only paid services is out of the question completely for a huge majority of today’s population. It’s no longer “the early days of the internet”.
I see everybody has the same PR text, what’s the original source exactly, since the news post here does not have one?
So will they then be scanning our emails only for information to sell to the NSA? Or will they just stop scanning altogether and let the NSA scan it themselves?
Just because they stop scanning it for advertising does not that they will stop scanning it. They probably still scan it or give it away, but with the difference that now we get to have a false sense of privacy, if we are naive enough.
Oh well people should know by now that if you work with anything Google related you have no privacy in that matter. Things like this really make no difference.