Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I will continue to emphasize that Google does not mine your private emails, full stop, for both free and paid users.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en

In fact, none of your data in any Workspace product is used for advertising or personalization purposes. Your web search history is used to generate ads on consumer gmail, and if you're a paid gmail user, there are no ads at all.

(Disclosure: I worked on Workspace for three years until about a year ago. The amount of controls and security on user data is quite intense.)



it's weird to me you didn't mention that they only stopped in 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html


I thought about it, but I wasn’t at google in 2017, so I have no context for thr decision or what was happening before that.

It’s also worth noting that paid users were never subject to this, including people who were free google apps for your domain users.


As long as data exists there will be incentive to have it pay for itself. Many at google and other places were surprised to find they were working with the NSA via an offer “they couldn’t refuse.”

This stuff is decided at a higher pay grade than worker bees, who are unaware barring leaks.


Why would I trust a company that both has a business incentive to lie, has the technical ability to hide it (so many factors go into ad targeting that it's impossible to confidently say which information was used for its targeting), has proven its bad faith several times such as with their non-GDPR compliant "consent" flow that up until very recently didn't give you an option to decline (despite being required by the GDPR), is a monopoly and has lock-in (email addresses aren't portable) and operates in a regulatory environment where the regulators are asleep at the wheel (GDPR enforcement is severely lacking especially for such big companies even when blatant bad-faith is demonstrated)?

If you still believe them, would you be interested in a bridge? I have one for sale at a very good price, email in my profile!




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: