Is Google reading the content of my email? | Hacker News Reader

Is Google reading the content of my email?

3 pointsoriettaxx8 comments

seriously.

Depends on what you mean by read. The contents of your email are processed by algorithms and those algorithms are used for advertising purposes. Google employees aren't reading your email.

They stopped doing that 2017.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html

Yes, it is spam filtered, tagged, categorized, most likely the meta data is utilized somewhere to enumerate your friends, business partners, and so on. Officially though, the content is not used for advertising purposes.

of course they are...are you paying for your gmail?

If not, then you ARE the product; you don't think they are providing you free email out of the goodness of their hearts do you?

> If not, then you ARE the product

I see this repeated a lot and the reasoning doesn't hold up. You aren't the product - your data is a commodity. And there's plenty of free stuff online for which your data isn't a commodity (e.g. Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, Khan Academy, so much of the free and open source software). So saying something like "if it's free, you're the product" is just lazy and demonstrably false.

That's not a great comparison. The free stuff like Wikipedia is supported through donations. In theory, if you're using it then you should also be donating a little to it.

I think if you are using a service/site run by a for-profit company, then it's probably fair to assume that they are making money off you somehow.

If you're not the customer, you're the product, doesn't quite fit. But it's a catchy analogy to illustrate a point.

Users are more like the soil of the product. Google is the farmer harvesting data that grows from it and profits from it.

Our new tragedy of the commons.

I mean, that's not as clear cut. There would be nothing stopping them from reading the contents of your mail or playing fast and loose with your data even if you were a paying customer. It's not a zero-sum game, as long as there is money to be made you rely on the goodness of their heart to not pursue it.

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