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Comment by cowlevel | Hacker News Reader

Google's always done this, it's the entire reason Gmail exists. Now they're just saying it.

This isn’t true and this level of cynicism is really unhelpful.

They originally used Gmail in that way. Many years later they stopped. This was a major victory for privacy. The fact they seem to be doing it now again is bad. Saying they’ve “always done this” is the kind of empty conspiratorial cynicism that dampens action and makes people feel it is futile to notice these changes or speak up about them.

The fact that they did it in the beginning and are doing it now makes the whole “well, there was a period of time when they didn’t do this” seem like a minor footnote to the notion that “they’ve always done this”. Even though the statement isn’t strictly true, it sure seems like the cynicism is warranted now and, with the benefit of hindsight, was back then too.

Giving up (aka cynicism) is easy.

On the contrary, it seems like giving up Google is hard for many people.

Giving up on Google and moving away from them is the way.

What's the evidence they stopped?

Information meta has on me - instagram reel viewing data

Information google has on me - my entire life

Yet meta ads are far more eerily relevant. This could imply two things -

a) Meta’s recommendation team is exponentially better (unlikely)

b) Google doesn’t use gmail and workspace data for ads

Meta tracks you on every page that has any Meta script, such as a Facebook like button. They're just better at tracking than Google is, amazingly, because meta plays dirtier.

The best evidence is just how comically bad their ad targeting is vs Meta

I don’t think it’s conspiratorial to question how strong the firewall was between your Gmail content and Google’s algorithms. Whether or not they actually leveraged that understanding for targeted ads is somewhat beside the point.

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