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Comment by afiori | Hacker News Reader

> What specifically are you concerned about that is a problem with this and not with them having the email in the first place?

That they use millions of computing-dollars to extract this information and store it.

Supposedly spam detection does not need to understand the numbers in your bank emails. Supposedly it needs mostly information about you previous contacts and spammy patterns from the rest of the internet.

The point being that you cannot misuse the information you do not have. Google is very good at thinking of a lot of this kind of quality of life functionality, they do not seem to realize how creepy and disconcerting they can be.

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Actually I want to make a slightly different point. The problem is that "intelligent" systems are unpredictable. In the future google could wrongly decide that your business is inconvenient blacklist you from searches. Maybe it got that idea from your name being mentioned in relation to some extreme stuff and unified you with ISIS.

Computers cannot “understand” anything. You are inappropriately anthropomorphizing an algorithm. There is no epistemological difference between spam filtering and credit card statement parsing. Either way it’s just a cpu pushing around ones and zeroes.

Yes there is, whatever information google extract form an email during spam detection need not be associated with your profile. That is not the case for financial data.

> Either way it’s just a cpu pushing around ones and zeroes.

What is even this supposed to mean? also the information "kill on sight" on your profile of a terrorist association is just one bit, do not worry about that. The fact that they are digital does not mean that the data won't affect your life nor that human or machine will take complex decision based on them.

I think I'm not understanding if you really answered the question you quoted - what specifically is the concern with having that information extracted? Is it just "it feels creepy"?

My point is that they already have the information, so any potential misuse or abuse is possible regardless of what types of parsing they're doing. It might just be inconvenient.

One example is holiday photos: I am ok with stranger taking photos with me in the background. I am not ok with someone spending a lot of effort going around collecting all the photo with me in the background trying to build a personal profile on me.

There is also a security issue, I trust google to keep my email secure, I trust less google to keep my profile metadata secure as selling it is its main business model.

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