My gmail account is viewed via my MacOS email client, or the mail app on my iPhone. I get zero ads. I rarely (if ever) log into gmail via a web browser. Don't many people do that? It's almost zero effort to set that up.
Regardless of seeing ads, everything you've ever typed to your family, friends and coworkers was sucked up by google and used to create a psychological profile of you. The only difference is that you're not seeing the results of that data mining in your face every day.
That's another claim that I'd love to see evidence of, unless of course it's simply a guess of yours which you're certainly entitled to believe. From all that I've read Google, Yahoo, Earthlink, etc use machine scanning for keywords applicable to advertising categories. Is that not true and if not where did you learn about this?
You're not giving Google nearly enough credit for how much better they are at doing what others also do. It is laughable that you, the biggest Google fan on this forum, would suggest that Google is just like Yahoo, Earthlink, Apple. Microsoft etc., because they all use machine scanning. That's like saying Ferrari is just like Kia, Mazda, Ford, Yugo, etc. because they all build cars. Google ability to extract and use the data from all their scans, compared to it's competitors, is liken to Ferrari ability to build better cars, than its competitors. Google is 10's of 1000's of time better at data mining than all their competitors combined. Give Google credit, where credit is due.
Where as other companies that scan emails accounts might learn that, a certain account holder drives a 2012 Toyota mini-van. Google would not only know that he drives a 2012 Toyota mini van, but also know the color, where he bought it from, how much he paid for it, whether it's parked on the streets or in a garage at night, how many miles it has on it, the last oil change, what company gas he likes to use, it's license and VIN number, how many times it's been through a Starbucks drive thru or to Disneyland and that he hates when his wife drives it because she readjust all the mirrors.
Google can do this because they can link the account user to a specific phone, computer, TV, cloud account, WiFi, other email, social media and YouTube accounts, etc. and correlate all the data mined from them. Google would probably also have several pictures of the mini van when he visited Disneyland. And Google can do this while scanning email for viruses, malwares and phishing scams. That's how good Google is, at what they do best ..... data mining.
Google does their scans with the same philosophy that Steve Jobs mentioned in his Stanford commencement speech, that is ... " You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future." Google data mine all the data they can, from everywhere they can, even if it didn't make sense to do so at the time they were scanning it. But after 100's of millions, if not 100's of billions, of such scans, the dots beings to connect and low and behold, Google could go back and correlate the data and come up with an accurate profile of all the people that drives Toyota mini vans and could probably reasonably guess what type of radio stations Toyota mini van drivers like to listen to, just based on the color of the mini van.
This is what separate Google, from all the others that scan emails. You actually think Google owns the vast majority of the online advertising dollars spent because they got good sales people?
Given their spin on this as a privacy benefit, I would have expected them to say that, if it were the case. The fact that they instead simply qualified their statements with the one thing it won't be scanned for leaves the door wide open.
Just not for ads.
Here ya go, via Ars: Google will still scan all your e-mails for search indexing, filtering, spam and virus detection, and the new smart reply feature
Those are merely the words of the ars writer, not the official wording. The only official wording that I've seen so far simply said "consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change.", which leaves room for interpretation as to the full extent of what the content will be used for after the change.
The deeper problem is that the data is being used to create psychological and behavioral profiles of every individual in the world (to the best of their ability). I don't give a crap if they're showing ads, I do give a crap that they are building psychometric profiles. That has not been addressed. If they're really turning over a new leaf they should make it VERY clear exactly how the content (and meta data) gathered while using their tools is used. I doubt very much that will be forthcoming.
Before the merged TOS for Google services in general this is what Google said they scanned Gmail for: Our automated systems analyse your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customised search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.”
So now strip targeted advertising out of that. Certainly doesn't sound too worrisome,
It sounds no more or less worrisome than before. You conveniently ignored the fact that anything and everything else they might want to do with that data is covered by the words "such as".
Those words mean there are no restrictions on what they do with the analysis as long as it's related to "product features". Note that "tailored advertising" is considered a product feature. Yes, I've spent many years dealing with contracts and attorneys, and every word in these kinds of documents gets scrutinized. It's not there by accident.
If they really, truly mean that they are going to stop using this data in creation and refinement of their user profiles (and non-users, remember, google fought in court for the right to gather data on non-users as well as users, so it's not just made up), then they could say so very explicitly. But they do not.
no more so than even a website like AI. At least they aren't in the business of selling personally identifiable data like so many other companies you share your information with, unless of course you believe they do that too.
I don't share anything with AI, nor almost any company whatsoever. Even companies like Acxiom likely have only a handful of public-record tidbits, such as property ownership where it's directly in my name. I guarantee you they have no information about any of my purchase preferences, travels, habits, likes/dislikes, etc. So no, there aren't "many other companies" with which I share my information.
This is a big part of why google in particular pisses me off so much. They are able to gather information about me culled from the private conversations of other people. That breaks what I think most people (at least historically) have considered a sacred social contract. It's what crosses the line from google being just another money-hungry data-slurping company, to one of the evil ones. Or at the very least, amoral. They're certainly not alone in that regard, but neither are they "good guys".
So now tell me more about these psychometric profiles Google is building. Where did you learn about them and where can we find out more about it? I remember reading about Facebook in that regard but yours is the first mention I've ever seen about Google doing so.
Ha ha. Now you're playing the game that you chided the guy above for. The only words you left out were "Citation please!", lol
All the big companies that are in the data mining industry have user profiles. Any worth their salt have shadow profiles as well. Built by very intelligent machine learning systems, and probably advanced stuff I don't even know about. That's how they make their money.
If you don't believe this, well, I know you do. I don't believe google is as careless with this data as facebook, and they are better at protecting it for their own internal purposes, but it's how they got to be a $670B company. I do know multiple people working for the company (even back in their early days), and I suspect you do as well, so I'm going to stop here and not fall further down this particular bait hole. Are you really trying to say that facebook is the only company in the valley building user profiles? lol. google and fb are neck and neck.
My gmail account is viewed via my MacOS email client, or the mail app on my iPhone. I get zero ads. I rarely (if ever) log into gmail via a web browser. Don't many people do that? It's almost zero effort to set that up.
Google still has ways of tracking you and targeting you, starting with the IP address. If/when you run a Google search, the ads you see can be tailored to your IP address.
How does that work with dynamic addresses? Seems like that would be a very poor way to track users for a few different reasons. Now if instead you mean Google and other ad placement providers can use an IP address to determine where in the world a request is coming from to show ads pertinent to that area, yeah that makes sense. But not for targeting an ad at you specifically from my limited knowledge of how it all works.
Are you really playing the fool here? Or are you just baiting? I'm kind of serious. I know you're a smart, well-read guy, and you play games with people on this board all the time.
Dynamic addresses are trivial to piece back together when you have other data available. First, most IPs in the U.S. these days are long-lived, even if technically considered dynamic. That's not the case in some countries, but it is here, in general. Most people still leave cookies on most of the time. Even those who clean them out from time to time aren't going to be able to coordinate that around when their IP changes. Any data that spans sessions across two different IPs will immediately associate those IPs and bridge them together in any kind of even halfway intelligent ML system.
Much of this "science" is imperfect, but it's very good. Good enough that companies pay a lot of money for it. google, on the other
hand, has all the best "world class" tracking tech in-house. They
don't generally need to attract attention by paying for it externally,
though they do occasionally acquire some of these companies.
Related; mobile devices are MUCH more trackable than traditional computers. And now there are companies that do things like pushing out audio above the normal range of human hearing in order to tie together users' mobile devices and their computers (and even their TVs). I hear (sadly, very ignorant) people all the time say "oh, no one cares about me that much to go to all that effort", but these companies exist, in some cases for the sole reason of tying individuals together across devices and IPs and locations because there's money to be made by doing so.
For anyone who feels unimportant, and thinks tracking/profiling companies don't care about you, read this article:
AcurianHealth, NaviStone, these are just a couple of the many, many, MANY companies dedicated to tying data together from disparate sources to create deeper and broader individual profiles.
My gmail account is viewed via my MacOS email client, or the mail app on my iPhone. I get zero ads. I rarely (if ever) log into gmail via a web browser. Don't many people do that? It's almost zero effort to set that up.
Google still has ways of tracking you and targeting you, starting with the IP address. If/when you run a Google search, the ads you see can be tailored to your IP address.
How does that work with dynamic addresses? Seems like that would be a very poor way to track users for a few different reasons. Now if instead you mean Google and other ad placement providers can use an IP address to determine where in the world a request is coming from to show ads pertinent to that area, yeah that makes sense. But not for targeting an ad at you specifically from my limited knowledge of how it all works.
Are you really playing the fool here? Or are you just baiting? I'm kind of serious. I know you're a smart, well-read guy, and you play games with people on this board all the time.
Dynamic addresses are trivial to piece back together when you have other data available. First, most IPs in the U.S. these days are long-lived, even if technically considered dynamic. That's not the case in some countries, but it is here, in general. Most people still leave cookies on most of the time. Even those who clean them out from time to time aren't going to be able to coordinate that around when their IP changes. Any data that spans sessions across two different IPs will immediately associate those IPs and bridge them together in any kind of even halfway intelligent ML system.
Much of this "science" is imperfect, but it's very good. Good enough that companies pay a lot of money for it. google, on the other
hand, has all the best "world class" tracking tech in-house. They
don't generally need to attract attention by paying for it externally,
though they do occasionally acquire some of these companies.
Related; mobile devices are MUCH more trackable than traditional computers. And now there are companies that do things like pushing out audio above the normal range of human hearing in order to tie together users' mobile devices and their computers (and even their TVs). I hear (sadly, very ignorant) people all the time say "oh, no one cares about me that much to go to all that effort", but these companies exist, in some cases for the sole reason of tying individuals together across devices and IPs and locations because there's money to be made by doing so.
For anyone who feels unimportant, and thinks tracking/profiling companies don't care about you, read this article:
AcurianHealth, NaviStone, these are just a couple of the many, many, MANY companies dedicated to tying data together from disparate sources to create deeper and broader individual profiles.
Gator is playing a desingenious MORON, though I'm sure he's not. After reading thousands of his mind numbing lies, distortions and him simply cherry picking responses to my posts; I put him on ignore.
I can myself extract massive amount of info just by parsing with my own algorythms very very disparate data on our own systems
(yeah, like everyone I'm into AI these days :-).
People don't have a clue what kind of profile we can get from seemingly unrelated data.
The new home sensors of IOT will be just the next level of privacy invasion Google will do and seemingly some will give their whole life away forever to save a few bucks.
Gator is playing a desingenious MORON, though I'm sure he's not. After reading thousands of his mind numbing lies, distortions and him simply cherry picking responses to my posts; I put him on ignore.
Amen, and I finally reached my breaking point and have taken advantage of the fairly recently expansion of number of people you can put on your Ignore List and placed him there among several other forum trolls and MR-type baddies here - doesn't work so well in a thread like this where everyone keeps replying to his posts.<sigh>
Apologism sure is one of the biggest psychoactive hallucinogens around, to look at Google and see only goodness, when their whole reason for being is so nefarious is appalling. FFS, they are in business to help other companies find better, more secret ways to extract money from your wallet for goods and services you neither need nor want, and the way they do this is to violate your privacy and sell what they discover about you to the highest bidders. I can't actually think of companies more evil than tha except maybe defence contractors who profit from humans killing each other in scale.
Few people look at any company and see only goodness.
Nefarious and appalling are purely subjective and in the free realm (away from managed domains) most people simply accept the Google terms. If most people saw Google as something so evil, they simply wouldn't use their services for personal matters.
Could appalling and nefarious be applied to Apple for deliberately eliminating second tier storage capacities on iDevices?
I think so, but that's just my opinion. You will find a lot of people here ultra defensively trying to justify the move. There are apologists for everything but I agree it's not a particularly healthy way to behave.
After many, many years of using Google services (Gmail, Drive, Blogger, Docs, Search etc) and not taking any special measures not to be tracked, my spam is almost non-essential, my phones are in peace and the only ad placements I see are related to my recent searches and most of them point to Amazon so I'm not sure if the source of those ads is Google or Amazon.
Perhaps, because I live in Europe there are better protections in place, I don't know.
I have a Facebook account under a pseudonym. I use WhatsApp (again Facebook), Telegram, the services provided by ISP, do a lot of online shopping and make constant use of internet services in general.
With the sole exception of the targeted ads based on recent searches, there is very little I can do to avoid people collecting data on me without incurring hassle. The question is if that data makes sense to anyone. If misinformation is the curse of the internet, conflicting data is a curse for data miners and I do try to make data on me conflict.
For all its mining prowess Google is probably scratching its head on me.
Ah, vivid imaginations running wild, and posters upset about openly and honestly discussing Google and the announcement they made in an AI story about Google. Do you suppose we should discuss political upheavals in the EU instead in this thread?
@Blah64 I can absolutely positively guarantee that Acxiom or others like them know much more about you than what you are suggesting, If you've ever filled a prescription there's a data miner with that information for sale. Have any car or home insurance policies? A whole lotta personal information was needed for that, and it ends up in an industry database. Medical insurance? Life Insurance? The information you submitted to those companies almost certainly is available for purchase/sharing too, regardless of supposed privacy restrictions. Credit cards and banking need no explanation. So dispense with the apparently unknown "Google knows all". Unless they're buying the info your insurers, credit card and bank is selling (any evidence to that effect?) they would not have access to that kind of detail IMO. But Acxiom (I use them as an example and catch-all only because they are the biggest buyer and seller of personal data in the world according to news articles) and many others like them do whether you play on the internet or not.
But at least I now understand your comments were not based on fact but presumption. And to be honest I would share some of your same presumptions but unlike you not try to present them as fact. Oh and BTW I've not ever talked to anyone connected with Google in any way other than when they tried to sell my on Adwords. That's it. Otherwise I have no inside knowledge not available to anyone else.
@MacPro: If you don't want to read comments about Google then it's easy. Don't read articles about Google on a discussion forum. What did you expect to see in a discussion thread about them. Just FUD from folks with an ax that needs grinding?
@williamlondon ; Very good move so perhaps you can relax a bit now. Cocoons are cozy, if a bit restricting. With luck there's room for two with @foggyhill. And yes Foggy you can surely combine sources for more accurate profiling, but the OP suggested IOP addresses in and of themselves were reliable personally identifiable trackers. I replied I did not think they are considering the prevalence of dynamic addresses. If you'd practice a bit of honesty you would admit that I'm correct.
@davidw ; Yes I'm sure Google knows a fair amount about me, but I've not ever seen any evidence that they know the depth of detail you presume they do, nor are you offering any evidence of it yourself. On the contrary much of what they suggest they know sourced from searches, music tastes, YouTube views and various Google services is not accurate. My age range is wrong, but I appreciate that I appear so young Many of "my interests" are not. Some places they think I've been are not places I've been. The types of music I like most is NOT the same as the type of music Google thinks I like. No I don't snow-ski No I don't care about MMA fighting either, nor Young Jeezy, so please no more YouTube suggestions for me about either of them. Please.
How do they know so little about the real me? The browser used during various activities, searches, videos, product/purchase research and such under my account sign-in are not necessarily me. That's the big flaw in Google data-gathering. It's depends much on a Google account sign-in, less so on whose fingers are on the keyboard. As for knowing what color vehicle I drive, I doubt that considering how poorly they've figured out the stuff they really should know. If connect-the-dots worked as well for Google as you assume it does how are they getting some of it so wrong? But you know what? Tot he advertisers who use Google it doesn't matter all that much who YOU are. what matters is that the message they want to get out is likely to be sen by someone they're hope will take an interest. It doesn't matter that I'm a conglomerate of everyone using my computing device. All that matters is SOMEONE here looking at it is interested which is what my very obviously merged profile is intended to address. You're ascribing far too much importance to knowing the specific you with certainty. It's not that important. They just want to put an ad/message in front of an interested entity on the other side of the screen.
So anyway I personally think your goal was to spread fear and distrust rather than fact, but you without a doubt succeeded in blending the two. Yes I read your link, which includes another to the pages where you can see what Google has connected to you. Try it out. Other companies could benefit from a bit of similar effort at a semblance of transparency. Google may not be as harmless as I presume them to be, but I have a tough time finding evidence of Google doing nefarious things with what they know. If you or anyone else has information that can help show Google to be dangerous, in bed with the government toe spy on us all, or is secretly selling your personal information for profit then you're at fault for not making everyone aware of the facts. But making these totally unsupported (so far) shadow claims that because they have "this" they must be doing "that", or because they sell ad space they must be selling your personal info pure opinion. But I get that Google has been admonished a handful of times by goverment/legal voices and some folks have reasons, and in some cases mostly because they're fans, employees or investors in a different tech company, to suggest we should be really suspicious of anything they do or say.
So it's cute when so many seem to take offense, but have such a hard time proving I'm not correct. Don't jump up and down claiming I'm lying about something or acting the part of a moron, only to stray off into things I myself never claimed to begin with as proof of it. If you really have some basis for disagreeing why not try something like "Hey Gator, I don't think you're right because" or "I think you've misunderstood and here's why...". Tossing out trolling words like liar, moron and other sundry insult attempts accomplishes just the opposite of encouraging discussion. For my part I don't think I've ever accused anyone here of outright lying. But yes there's a lot of confusion and misunderstanding demonstrated on certain subjects. Isn't that what discussion is supposed to help clarify? If not why have one? Why even bother to reply if all someone has to add is anger and insults that amount to no more that the type of trolling we all dislike reading here from others.
In a nutshell: FUD does not add value except as a marketing tool. It does not add to knowledge, nor does it encourage honest discussion, or help with decision making. It's sad so many folks on the internet seem hell-bent on spreading it instead of using the resources on the web for the public benefit some of the originators had hoped for, furthering education and the spread of knowledge. And no we don't now need to go on a history lesson about the formation of the internet. We can all look that up and learn about if we wish, as long as FUD hasn't intruded too much on that story too.
I keep my gmail account simply to keep someone else from using the address, but I quit using it long ago. Like someone said above, if the 'product' is free, then you are the product, and Google is in the business of aggregating and monetizing your data. They may use technology to do that, but they are fundamentally a data and advertising company.
This will be very appreciated news for some number of Gmail users. Of course this might have been prompted by Judge Koh who clearly disliked the practice and had full intention of issuing rules under which Google would be permitted to do so. Far easier and more PR worthy to get out ahead of it and simply stop doing it altogether.
You're quite the Google apologist, aren't you? I often wonder how/where you find the time to make all this effort to defend this company and how it pays for you. From my years of being an AI reader, it wasn't really a surprise to see your's being the first reply on this post.
My gmail account is viewed via my MacOS email client, or the mail app on my iPhone. I get zero ads. I rarely (if ever) log into gmail via a web browser. Don't many people do that? It's almost zero effort to set that up.
Google still has ways of tracking you and targeting you, starting with the IP address. If/when you run a Google search, the ads you see can be tailored to your IP address.
How does that work with dynamic addresses? Seems like that would be a very poor way to track users for a few different reasons. Now if instead you mean Google and other ad placement providers can use an IP address to determine where in the world a request is coming from to show ads pertinent to that area, yeah that makes sense. But not for targeting an ad at you specifically from my limited knowledge of how it all works.
Dynamic IP addresses are what the vast majority of the global population use when connecting to the Internet. You really mean to say Google hasn't long since figured out a way to link/track a Google profile across changing IP addresses? It's nice to see how you can conveniently make Google look technically inept to suit your particular narrative.
My gmail account is viewed via my MacOS email client, or the mail app on my iPhone. I get zero ads. I rarely (if ever) log into gmail via a web browser. Don't many people do that? It's almost zero effort to set that up.
Google still has ways of tracking you and targeting you, starting with the IP address. If/when you run a Google search, the ads you see can be tailored to your IP address.
How does that work with dynamic addresses? Seems like that would be a very poor way to track users for a few different reasons. Now if instead you mean Google and other ad placement providers can use an IP address to determine where in the world a request is coming from to show ads pertinent to that area, yeah that makes sense. But not for targeting an ad at you specifically from my limited knowledge of how it all works.
Dynamic IP addresses are what the vast majority of the global population use when connecting to the Internet. You really mean to say Google hasn't long since figured out a way to link/track a Google profile across changing IP addresses? It's nice to see how you can conveniently make Google look technically inept to suit your particular narrative.
If you have some evidence that they do please do post it. I was asking and not stating a fact. Picking a fight doesn't encourage discussion so please try to avoid making something not personal into one.
This will be very appreciated news for some number of Gmail users. Of course this might have been prompted by Judge Koh who clearly disliked the practice and had full intention of issuing rules under which Google would be permitted to do so. Far easier and more PR worthy to get out ahead of it and simply stop doing it altogether.
You're quite the Google apologist, aren't you? I often wonder how/where you find the time to make all this effort to defend this company and how it pays for you. From my years of being an AI reader, it wasn't really a surprise to see your's being the first reply on this post.
You thought that was an apology? LOL. Seems I'm the only one pointing out they probably didn't make this change out of the goodness of their heart, but instead trying to get out ahead of a certain Judge Koh and what she has said and what's still to come from her on the subject.
My gmail account is viewed via my MacOS email client, or the mail app on my iPhone. I get zero ads. I rarely (if ever) log into gmail via a web browser. Don't many people do that? It's almost zero effort to set that up.
Google still has ways of tracking you and targeting you, starting with the IP address. If/when you run a Google search, the ads you see can be tailored to your IP address.
How does that work with dynamic addresses? Seems like that would be a very poor way to track users for a few different reasons. Now if instead you mean Google and other ad placement providers can use an IP address to determine where in the world a request is coming from to show ads pertinent to that area, yeah that makes sense. But not for targeting an ad at you specifically from my limited knowledge of how it all works.
Dynamic IP addresses are what the vast majority of the global population use when connecting to the Internet. You really mean to say Google hasn't long since figured out a way to link/track a Google profile across changing IP addresses? It's nice to see how you can conveniently make Google look technically inept to suit your particular narrative.
If you have some evidence that they do please do post it. I was asking and not stating a fact. Picking a fight doesn't encourage discussion so please try to avoid making something not personal into one.
Hav you read anything in this thread? It was explained above by Blah64 how easy it is via one single vector - cookies. Since you seem to have missed it, I'll lay it out in the simplest terms possible:
- You visit a website which stores a cookie to remember your login preferences. Your IP is 255.255.255.001. They now have this IP associated with that specific user. - A month later your power goes out and when your Internet comes back on you get a new IP address, this time it's 255.255.255.002. - You visit the same website. Using the cookie it knows who the user is. But when it checks the IP it finds out that it's changed. They update their information to reflect the IP has changed. Same user, different and new IP.
How is this hard to understand? And this is only one single (and easy) way this can be done.
Now imagine a mobile device. You visit a website while connected to WiFi. They get lots of hits at 255.255.255.001 in the early morning, evening and weekends. They also get lots of hits at 255.255.255.002 during normal business hours. Gee, do you think they might have just figured out your home and work IPs from this simple pattern? And if they get other users from 255.255.255.002 they've just figured out who your coworkers are. If they get other users at 255.255.255.001 they know who your friends/family are.
Edited: Forgot your original question. No, we don't have proof that Google does this. Which is why you worded your question the way you did, so you can claim absence of proof means they're not doing it. You'd have to be very naive to think Google doesn't know how to track users across IPs.
My gmail account is viewed via my MacOS email client, or the mail app on my iPhone. I get zero ads. I rarely (if ever) log into gmail via a web browser. Don't many people do that? It's almost zero effort to set that up.
Google still has ways of tracking you and targeting you, starting with the IP address. If/when you run a Google search, the ads you see can be tailored to your IP address.
How does that work with dynamic addresses? Seems like that would be a very poor way to track users for a few different reasons. Now if instead you mean Google and other ad placement providers can use an IP address to determine where in the world a request is coming from to show ads pertinent to that area, yeah that makes sense. But not for targeting an ad at you specifically from my limited knowledge of how it all works.
Dynamic IP addresses are what the vast majority of the global population use when connecting to the Internet. You really mean to say Google hasn't long since figured out a way to link/track a Google profile across changing IP addresses? It's nice to see how you can conveniently make Google look technically inept to suit your particular narrative.
If you have some evidence that they do please do post it. I was asking and not stating a fact. Picking a fight doesn't encourage discussion so please try to avoid making something not personal into one.
Hav you read anything in this thread? It was explained above by Blah64 how easy it is via one single vector - cookies. Since you seem to have missed it, I'll lay it out in the simplest terms possible:
- You visit a website which stores a cookie to remember your login preferences. Your IP is 255.255.255.001. They now have this IP associated with that specific user. - A month later your power goes out and when your Internet comes back on you get a new IP address, this time it's 255.255.255.002. - You visit the same website. Using the cookie it knows who the user is. But when it checks the IP it finds out that it's changed. They update their information to reflect the IP has changed. Same user, different and new IP.
How is this hard to understand? And this is only one single (and easy) way this can be done.
Now imagine a mobile device. You visit a website while connected to WiFi. They get lots of hits at 255.255.255.001 in the early morning, evening and weekends. They also get lots of hits at 255.255.255.002 during normal business hours. Gee, do you think they might have just figured out your home and work IPs from this simple pattern? And if they get other users from 255.255.255.002 they've just figured out who your coworkers are. If they get other users at 255.255.255.001 they know who your friends/family are.
Edited: Forgot your original question. No, we don't have proof that Google does this. Which is why you worded your question the way you did, so you can claim absence of proof means they're not doing it. You'd have to be very naive to think Google doesn't know how to track users across IPs.
I know about cookies. You like a few others here want to pretend that I'm saying Google doesn't track web users. Of course cookies, and pixel tags and web beacons, and the rest of their ilk are much better (not perfect) trackers of your internet travels. which is why they're used by nearly everyone and that includes Apple. (no I am not saying Apple is the same as Google or anyone else) They're MUCH more reliable than using IP addresses if individual tracking is the goal, at least to the best of my knowledge. Pretty sure that's what I said in the first place isn't it? If not then what did I actually claim that wasn't accurate?
And no, absence of proof does not mean anything other than, well... absence of proof. It doesn't demonstrate something either did or didn't happen, nor have I ever implied that it does. What a silly connection to make.
If you have a real and legitimate reason to disagree with something I've written, even if just an opinion of mine, I encourage you to politely say so as you have (maybe not so politely) done before. Making up reasons just to fit an agenda of "killing the messenger" is intellectually dishonest and very unhelpful on a discussion forum.
Just to experiment I turned off my ad-blocker for a couple of hours today, researched a couple of products for the yard, made one purchase, then returned here to see what kind of ads I might see. There were several that appeared in the sidebar on the main page and a couple in-line ones too. ( I never see ads here so old news to those not blocking ads). Some were from Google and some from other placement companies. Noticeably the only ads put in front of me connected to product browsing from this morning came from Criteo (three) and oddly one from Intel directly. The ones Google presented here had nothing at all to do with any search or inquiry I had ever made, and TBH were for products I'd not likely ever have any interest in.
My gmail account is viewed via my MacOS email client, or the mail app on my iPhone. I get zero ads. I rarely (if ever) log into gmail via a web browser. Don't many people do that? It's almost zero effort to set that up.
Google still has ways of tracking you and targeting you, starting with the IP address. If/when you run a Google search, the ads you see can be tailored to your IP address.
How does that work with dynamic addresses? Seems like that would be a very poor way to track users for a few different reasons. Now if instead you mean Google and other ad placement providers can use an IP address to determine where in the world a request is coming from to show ads pertinent to that area, yeah that makes sense. But not for targeting an ad at you specifically from my limited knowledge of how it all works.
Dynamic IP addresses are what the vast majority of the global population use when connecting to the Internet. You really mean to say Google hasn't long since figured out a way to link/track a Google profile across changing IP addresses? It's nice to see how you can conveniently make Google look technically inept to suit your particular narrative.
If you have some evidence that they do please do post it. I was asking and not stating a fact. Picking a fight doesn't encourage discussion so please try to avoid making something not personal into one.
Hav you read anything in this thread? It was explained above by Blah64 how easy it is via one single vector - cookies. Since you seem to have missed it, I'll lay it out in the simplest terms possible:
- You visit a website which stores a cookie to remember your login preferences. Your IP is 255.255.255.001. They now have this IP associated with that specific user. - A month later your power goes out and when your Internet comes back on you get a new IP address, this time it's 255.255.255.002. - You visit the same website. Using the cookie it knows who the user is. But when it checks the IP it finds out that it's changed. They update their information to reflect the IP has changed. Same user, different and new IP.
How is this hard to understand? And this is only one single (and easy) way this can be done.
Now imagine a mobile device. You visit a website while connected to WiFi. They get lots of hits at 255.255.255.001 in the early morning, evening and weekends. They also get lots of hits at 255.255.255.002 during normal business hours. Gee, do you think they might have just figured out your home and work IPs from this simple pattern? And if they get other users from 255.255.255.002 they've just figured out who your coworkers are. If they get other users at 255.255.255.001 they know who your friends/family are.
Edited: Forgot your original question. No, we don't have proof that Google does this. Which is why you worded your question the way you did, so you can claim absence of proof means they're not doing it. You'd have to be very naive to think Google doesn't know how to track users across IPs.
One thing people forget is that Google Analytics is on almost all web sites and this collects a hell of a lot of data supposedly for the companies their doing the analysis for (Google is such a nice person...). So, by using analytics, your giving Google access to your own client's public info (and more if they login into your site).
That's not even going into the kind of behavoral tracking you could do on the user data (demands a lot more processing), they could process webcams, GPS location of all trackable objects including himself a person possesses, home audio, everything they say, health data (that people have given them... And you know they will for a few bucks), content of freezers (this will come soon), etc.
That's just the first level, by cross indexing everything in space, time and whatever, in real time, you target specific data collection for a specific person too; or simply create a wall to wall 100% accurate profile of who you are, where you've been and what you have done and why you're doing it. Police states will be very very happy with this state of affair of course.
This will be very appreciated news for some number of Gmail users. Of course this might have been prompted by Judge Koh who clearly disliked the practice and had full intention of issuing rules under which Google would be permitted to do so. Far easier and more PR worthy to get out ahead of it and simply stop doing it altogether.
From my years of being an AI reader, it wasn't really a surprise to see your's being the first reply on this post.
From my years of being a contributing AI forum member it wasn't really a surprise to see a new guy start out his history here trying to make things personal instead of insightful, falling into the same routine of so many other posters on so many other sites. We can learn from each other or insult each other. Your choice.
Comments
You're not giving Google nearly enough credit for how much better they are at doing what others also do. It is laughable that you, the biggest Google fan on this forum, would suggest that Google is just like Yahoo, Earthlink, Apple. Microsoft etc., because they all use machine scanning. That's like saying Ferrari is just like Kia, Mazda, Ford, Yugo, etc. because they all build cars. Google ability to extract and use the data from all their scans, compared to it's competitors, is liken to Ferrari ability to build better cars, than its competitors. Google is 10's of 1000's of time better at data mining than all their competitors combined. Give Google credit, where credit is due.
Where as other companies that scan emails accounts might learn that, a certain account holder drives a 2012 Toyota mini-van. Google would not only know that he drives a 2012 Toyota mini van, but also know the color, where he bought it from, how much he paid for it, whether it's parked on the streets or in a garage at night, how many miles it has on it, the last oil change, what company gas he likes to use, it's license and VIN number, how many times it's been through a Starbucks drive thru or to Disneyland and that he hates when his wife drives it because she readjust all the mirrors.
Google can do this because they can link the account user to a specific phone, computer, TV, cloud account, WiFi, other email, social media and YouTube accounts, etc. and correlate all the data mined from them. Google would probably also have several pictures of the mini van when he visited Disneyland. And Google can do this while scanning email for viruses, malwares and phishing scams. That's how good Google is, at what they do best ..... data mining.
Google does their scans with the same philosophy that Steve Jobs mentioned in his Stanford commencement speech, that is ... " You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future." Google data mine all the data they can, from everywhere they can, even if it didn't make sense to do so at the time they were scanning it. But after 100's of millions, if not 100's of billions, of such scans, the dots beings to connect and low and behold, Google could go back and correlate the data and come up with an accurate profile of all the people that drives Toyota mini vans and could probably reasonably guess what type of radio stations Toyota mini van drivers like to listen to, just based on the color of the mini van.
This is what separate Google, from all the others that scan emails. You actually think Google owns the vast majority of the online advertising dollars spent because they got good sales people?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/11/19/everything-google-knows-about-you-and-how-it-knows-it/?utm_term=.9894a1ee740a
If they really, truly mean that they are going to stop using this data in creation and refinement of their user profiles (and non-users, remember, google fought in court for the right to gather data on non-users as well as users, so it's not just made up), then they could say so very explicitly. But they do not.
I don't share anything with AI, nor almost any company whatsoever. Even companies like Acxiom likely have only a handful of public-record tidbits, such as property ownership where it's directly in my name. I guarantee you they have no information about any of my purchase preferences, travels, habits, likes/dislikes, etc. So no, there aren't "many other companies" with which I share my information.
This is a big part of why google in particular pisses me off so much. They are able to gather information about me culled from the private conversations of other people. That breaks what I think most people (at least historically) have considered a sacred social contract. It's what crosses the line from google being just another money-hungry data-slurping company, to one of the evil ones. Or at the very least, amoral. They're certainly not alone in that regard, but neither are they "good guys".
Ha ha. Now you're playing the game that you chided the guy above for. The only words you left out were "Citation please!", lol
All the big companies that are in the data mining industry have user profiles. Any worth their salt have shadow profiles as well. Built by very intelligent machine learning systems, and probably advanced stuff I don't even know about. That's how they make their money. If you don't believe this, well, I know you do. I don't believe google is as careless with this data as facebook, and they are better at protecting it for their own internal purposes, but it's how they got to be a $670B company. I do know multiple people working for the company (even back in their early days), and I suspect you do as well, so I'm going to stop here and not fall further down this particular bait hole. Are you really trying to say that facebook is the only company in the valley building user profiles? lol. google and fb are neck and neck.
Are you really playing the fool here? Or are you just baiting? I'm kind of serious. I know you're a smart, well-read guy, and you play games with people on this board all the time.
Dynamic addresses are trivial to piece back together when you have other data available. First, most IPs in the U.S. these days are long-lived, even if technically considered dynamic. That's not the case in some countries, but it is here, in general. Most people still leave cookies on most of the time. Even those who clean them out from time to time aren't going to be able to coordinate that around when their IP changes. Any data that spans sessions across two different IPs will immediately associate those IPs and bridge them together in any kind of even halfway intelligent ML system.
Much of this "science" is imperfect, but it's very good. Good enough that companies pay a lot of money for it. google, on the other hand, has all the best "world class" tracking tech in-house. They don't generally need to attract attention by paying for it externally, though they do occasionally acquire some of these companies.
Related; mobile devices are MUCH more trackable than traditional computers. And now there are companies that do things like pushing out audio above the normal range of human hearing in order to tie together users' mobile devices and their computers (and even their TVs). I hear (sadly, very ignorant) people all the time say "oh, no one cares about me that much to go to all that effort", but these companies exist, in some cases for the sole reason of tying individuals together across devices and IPs and locations because there's money to be made by doing so.
For anyone who feels unimportant, and thinks tracking/profiling companies don't care about you, read this article:
https://gizmodo.com/how-a-company-you-ve-never-heard-of-sends-you-letters-a-1795643539
AcurianHealth, NaviStone, these are just a couple of the many, many, MANY companies dedicated to tying data together from disparate sources to create deeper and broader individual profiles.
Nefarious and appalling are purely subjective and in the free realm (away from managed domains) most people simply accept the Google terms. If most people saw Google as something so evil, they simply wouldn't use their services for personal matters.
Could appalling and nefarious be applied to Apple for deliberately eliminating second tier storage capacities on iDevices?
I think so, but that's just my opinion. You will find a lot of people here ultra defensively trying to justify the move. There are apologists for everything but I agree it's not a particularly healthy way to behave.
Perhaps, because I live in Europe there are better protections in place, I don't know.
I have a Facebook account under a pseudonym. I use WhatsApp (again Facebook), Telegram, the services provided by ISP, do a lot of online shopping and make constant use of internet services in general.
With the sole exception of the targeted ads based on recent searches, there is very little I can do to avoid people collecting data on me without incurring hassle. The question is if that data makes sense to anyone. If misinformation is the curse of the internet, conflicting data is a curse for data miners and I do try to make data on me conflict.
For all its mining prowess Google is probably scratching its head on me.
@Blah64
I can absolutely positively guarantee that Acxiom or others like them know much more about you than what you are suggesting, If you've ever filled a prescription there's a data miner with that information for sale. Have any car or home insurance policies? A whole lotta personal information was needed for that, and it ends up in an industry database. Medical insurance? Life Insurance? The information you submitted to those companies almost certainly is available for purchase/sharing too, regardless of supposed privacy restrictions. Credit cards and banking need no explanation. So dispense with the apparently unknown "Google knows all". Unless they're buying the info your insurers, credit card and bank is selling (any evidence to that effect?) they would not have access to that kind of detail IMO. But Acxiom (I use them as an example and catch-all only because they are the biggest buyer and seller of personal data in the world according to news articles) and many others like them do whether you play on the internet or not.
But at least I now understand your comments were not based on fact but presumption. And to be honest I would share some of your same presumptions but unlike you not try to present them as fact. Oh and BTW I've not ever talked to anyone connected with Google in any way other than when they tried to sell my on Adwords. That's it. Otherwise I have no inside knowledge not available to anyone else.
@MacPro:
If you don't want to read comments about Google then it's easy. Don't read articles about Google on a discussion forum. What did you expect to see in a discussion thread about them. Just FUD from folks with an ax that needs grinding?
@williamlondon ;
Very good move so perhaps you can relax a bit now. Cocoons are cozy, if a bit restricting. With luck there's room for two with @foggyhill. And yes Foggy you can surely combine sources for more accurate profiling, but the OP suggested IOP addresses in and of themselves were reliable personally identifiable trackers. I replied I did not think they are considering the prevalence of dynamic addresses. If you'd practice a bit of honesty you would admit that I'm correct.
@davidw ;
Yes I'm sure Google knows a fair amount about me, but I've not ever seen any evidence that they know the depth of detail you presume they do, nor are you offering any evidence of it yourself. On the contrary much of what they suggest they know sourced from searches, music tastes, YouTube views and various Google services is not accurate.
My age range is wrong, but I appreciate that I appear so young
Many of "my interests" are not.
Some places they think I've been are not places I've been.
The types of music I like most is NOT the same as the type of music Google thinks I like.
No I don't snow-ski
No I don't care about MMA fighting either, nor Young Jeezy, so please no more YouTube suggestions for me about either of them. Please.
How do they know so little about the real me? The browser used during various activities, searches, videos, product/purchase research and such under my account sign-in are not necessarily me. That's the big flaw in Google data-gathering. It's depends much on a Google account sign-in, less so on whose fingers are on the keyboard. As for knowing what color vehicle I drive, I doubt that considering how poorly they've figured out the stuff they really should know. If connect-the-dots worked as well for Google as you assume it does how are they getting some of it so wrong? But you know what? Tot he advertisers who use Google it doesn't matter all that much who YOU are. what matters is that the message they want to get out is likely to be sen by someone they're hope will take an interest. It doesn't matter that I'm a conglomerate of everyone using my computing device. All that matters is SOMEONE here looking at it is interested which is what my very obviously merged profile is intended to address. You're ascribing far too much importance to knowing the specific you with certainty. It's not that important. They just want to put an ad/message in front of an interested entity on the other side of the screen.
So anyway I personally think your goal was to spread fear and distrust rather than fact, but you without a doubt succeeded in blending the two. Yes I read your link, which includes another to the pages where you can see what Google has connected to you. Try it out. Other companies could benefit from a bit of similar effort at a semblance of transparency. Google may not be as harmless as I presume them to be, but I have a tough time finding evidence of Google doing nefarious things with what they know. If you or anyone else has information that can help show Google to be dangerous, in bed with the government toe spy on us all, or is secretly selling your personal information for profit then you're at fault for not making everyone aware of the facts. But making these totally unsupported (so far) shadow claims that because they have "this" they must be doing "that", or because they sell ad space they must be selling your personal info pure opinion. But I get that Google has been admonished a handful of times by goverment/legal voices and some folks have reasons, and in some cases mostly because they're fans, employees or investors in a different tech company, to suggest we should be really suspicious of anything they do or say.
So it's cute when so many seem to take offense, but have such a hard time proving I'm not correct. Don't jump up and down claiming I'm lying about something or acting the part of a moron, only to stray off into things I myself never claimed to begin with as proof of it. If you really have some basis for disagreeing why not try something like "Hey Gator, I don't think you're right because" or "I think you've misunderstood and here's why...".
Tossing out trolling words like liar, moron and other sundry insult attempts accomplishes just the opposite of encouraging discussion. For my part I don't think I've ever accused anyone here of outright lying. But yes there's a lot of confusion and misunderstanding demonstrated on certain subjects. Isn't that what discussion is supposed to help clarify? If not why have one? Why even bother to reply if all someone has to add is anger and insults that amount to no more that the type of trolling we all dislike reading here from others.
In a nutshell: FUD does not add value except as a marketing tool. It does not add to knowledge, nor does it encourage honest discussion, or help with decision making. It's sad so many folks on the internet seem hell-bent on spreading it instead of using the resources on the web for the public benefit some of the originators had hoped for, furthering education and the spread of knowledge. And no we don't now need to go on a history lesson about the formation of the internet. We can all look that up and learn about if we wish, as long as FUD hasn't intruded too much on that story too.
Heck of an apology huh?
Hav you read anything in this thread? It was explained above by Blah64 how easy it is via one single vector - cookies. Since you seem to have missed it, I'll lay it out in the simplest terms possible:
- You visit a website which stores a cookie to remember your login preferences. Your IP is 255.255.255.001. They now have this IP associated with that specific user.
- A month later your power goes out and when your Internet comes back on you get a new IP address, this time it's 255.255.255.002.
- You visit the same website. Using the cookie it knows who the user is. But when it checks the IP it finds out that it's changed. They update their information to reflect the IP has changed. Same user, different and new IP.
How is this hard to understand? And this is only one single (and easy) way this can be done.
Now imagine a mobile device. You visit a website while connected to WiFi. They get lots of hits at 255.255.255.001 in the early morning, evening and weekends. They also get lots of hits at 255.255.255.002 during normal business hours. Gee, do you think they might have just figured out your home and work IPs from this simple pattern? And if they get other users from 255.255.255.002 they've just figured out who your coworkers are. If they get other users at 255.255.255.001 they know who your friends/family are.
Edited: Forgot your original question. No, we don't have proof that Google does this. Which is why you worded your question the way you did, so you can claim absence of proof means they're not doing it. You'd have to be very naive to think Google doesn't know how to track users across IPs.
And no, absence of proof does not mean anything other than, well... absence of proof. It doesn't demonstrate something either did or didn't happen, nor have I ever implied that it does. What a silly connection to make.
If you have a real and legitimate reason to disagree with something I've written, even if just an opinion of mine, I encourage you to politely say so as you have (maybe not so politely) done before. Making up reasons just to fit an agenda of "killing the messenger" is intellectually dishonest and very unhelpful on a discussion forum.
Just to experiment I turned off my ad-blocker for a couple of hours today, researched a couple of products for the yard, made one purchase, then returned here to see what kind of ads I might see. There were several that appeared in the sidebar on the main page and a couple in-line ones too. ( I never see ads here so old news to those not blocking ads). Some were from Google and some from other placement companies. Noticeably the only ads put in front of me connected to product browsing from this morning came from Criteo (three) and oddly one from Intel directly. The ones Google presented here had nothing at all to do with any search or inquiry I had ever made, and TBH were for products I'd not likely ever have any interest in.
Tell that to John Podesta.
Laughing my Ossoff!
😂