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Comment by neverminder | Hacker News Reader

I have this hypothesis that technically minded people (like us) are completely unprofitable to Google when it comes to ads. I've never clicked on any ad or anything even remotely close to an ad ever unless it was accidental, I've ran adblockers on all my devices since I can remember. So I guess it's a bit ironic that people who are least profitable for Google are the most concerned about being tracked by it. I should mention however that I do buy their hardware products (phones, laptops) and pay for Gmail accounts for my own domain names, but that's just because they make good quality stuff which to me personally has nothing to do with ads.

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You don't have to click on an ad to be tracked. Also, you don't find it even a little concerning that Google reads all your email?

Email is not something private by design. At least Google is a competent company when it comes to provide such services.

They don't read your email, they scan it. These things are semantically and practically different. Reading, to me, means human comprehension. It's not like some Google employee is going through my messages. Scanning is just robots putting keywords in a database to target ads. Which is annoying, but it's not really the same, privacy-wise.

Also to my understanding they don't touch the GSuite email accounts. There was actually someone here from the relevant Google team few months ago confirming that they go to great lengths to ensure that didn't happen. I can't dig up that particular comment though.

You don't have to be a GMail user for Google to end up with a copy of a large percentage of your eMail.

Because lots of users do have GMail a lot of your messages will end up on their servers.

However, that's not to say it's not a good idea to practice good hygiene yourself and find a provider that suits your goals.

If not Google then who? Fastmail? Protonmail? Someone will always read our emails, I just don't see a way around it. We kinda live in a world based on trust, maybe someday that will change, but probably not any time soon.

Might be true but I wouldn't take the risk. It's not only about ads when they have access to your emails, location history and track what do you do on the internet.

I'm completely aware of the risks, so I try to keep my stuff they can keep track off as mundane as possible. Unfortunately when it comes to emails someone will always have access to them. My plan is eventually to get something like that Purism phone for more personal stuff. There are no perfect solutions.

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