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Comment by romed | Hacker News Reader

A very good feature of gmail’s extensive “email intelligence” that grew out of Inbox. How did you think the Purchases label worked? How did you think Google Now alerts you on your mobile when your packages are delivered?

If this surprises you you’re going to be flabbergasted by how the Trips label works.

Oh yeah also Gmail and Now work together to bring you those reminders to pay your bills.

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Also when you browse Google maps you can see reservation dates on hotels and other venues. I thought the fact that Google scrapes emails to power other services was obvious by now.

Why can't this be done offline?

> Why can't this be done offline?

Where? On every device a user owns?

That’s what Apple does to some extend. “Siri found in mail” contacts and events. Maybe some more.

Siri pulls from Messages for those things as well, and will pull spelling and other suggestions out of Safari browsing.

Yes. A better question would be “why does google itself need this information when it’s just a client side UI feature?”

Because... Google's business model. Your ability to see your purchase history on a Google page is neat, but it seems a safe bet that the real reason they want your purchase history is because their profile about you as a set of eyeballs becomes more valuable allowing them to charge higher rates on ads. Notice that they only claimed to have stopped scraping gmail for ad targeting purposes, not that they stopped scraping period.

Gmail's primary UI is a web browser. How... how do you think that _actually_ might work?

It can if everyone was willing to pay for the developer time.

To build offline, Google would still need access to (some subset) of data at some point to train the models / write the heuristics.

Sure, but why does it have to be my data? Can't they do it on data they already have, or maybe as their employees to run it (who presumably have much more control over how the data is actually used)?

Exactly. Google is saying they "need the cloud" to make the prediction/action. They also require as grist for their mill: my data.

I would much prefer some basic heuristics executed on-device using my data in a secured processing state. The hueristic-building could be in the cloud, but on datasets other than mine, and let me tweak those dials!

Hell, I'd even pay for this feature.

It's very unlikely that Google employees are going to be representative of Google's users as a whole (just look at the startups building niche products for Bay Area techies). Ditto if you only looked at data of users that opted in (maybe they're highly unrepresentative).

That means the heuristics/models that get built would be a worse fit for you, as a user, although it sounds like that's a tradeoff that you'd like.

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