blah64

gatorguy said:

cpsro said:

sflocal said:

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:

  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.

gatorguy said:

blah64 said:

gatorguy said:

tulkas said:

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.

sflocal said:

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.

Hahaha, no doubt. Now his compensation will have been $0. There's a reason we don't hear #s for all these deals, because the #s are industry secrets, enforced by contract. "Half mil" --> zero.

Herbivore2 said: "To use Google for anything is totally absurd from my perspective. By the way, more and more of my friends and colleagues have turned to Bing for default search. "

Why not turn to a privacy-oriented search engine like DuckDuckGo or StartPage instead?

DuckDuckGo probably doesn't return *quite* as good of results as Google, but they have other very nice features.

StartPage generally has excellent search results, and they have the added benefit of being a German company, with very strong laws supporting privacy.

Bing/Microsoft, unfortunately, has been veering toward the google-esque road of sucking up all their customers' personal data, much of it not only without explicit permission, but quite literally unblockable by end users. This is separate from search, happening merely by having a windows10 computer connected to the internet without an external firewall specifically set up to block this behavior.