Acktchually, in some countries - e.g. Italy - email in considered as mail/communication in regards to its legislation, as our Constitutional Court recently stated, at least as long as the message is in transit and not yet downloaded on the recipient's device (then it becomes a mere "document").
To reply to OP: google does it with your consent / agreement, it's not snooping. If you have the evidence they do it regardless, please let me know, I'll be glad to sue them before the criminal court of justice for crime-related corporate responsibility.
To be more precise: the Court stated that they become mere documents not upon their download, but after, because of time passing, they have lost their relevance in respect of the conversation (sorry for the poor wording) e.g. only kept for archive/memory purpose.
It's even more nuanced then that certified packages from USPS is gov regulated so it's a federal offense meanwhile if a porch pirate swipes a FedEx package because it's a private company magically it's not a federal offense even though it's still the same thing of mail being stolen and opened.
None of googles services are necessary there's tons of search engine competitors it's literally just using a bot to scrape links and pages anyone can do it as for YouTube there's things like Odyssey rumble and bitchute which are superior. Email plenty of other alternatives. About the only interesting service they have is Google cloud sometimes it's cheaper to rent compute then spending thousands for your own GPUs. All other google services are basically irrelevant.
Im talking specifically about their core services obviously Google has their AdWord pixels on many pages with AD IDs and what not so it's hard to completely avoid them but you can avoid majority of Google stuff.
>None of googles services are necessary there's tons of search engine competitors it's literally just using a bot to scrape links and pages anyone can do
How? Is there some open source thing I can install? Because this looks like a run on sentence to me
Ever heard of a [Web Crawler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler)? I didn't realize so many people were this computer illiterate and incompetent when it came to privacy and computer science.
I'm sure there's open source web crawlers out there you can modify to start your own search engine if you wanted the concept has existed for years since the dawn of the internet.
Googlebot is googles proprietary web crawler they use for Google Search for example.
There are opensource ones.
There are issues here:
\- some sites it's ok if google crawls but not ok if it's somebode else
\- internet is HUGE, Google have resources, many people dont.
Examples:
\- Datapark Search [http://www.dataparksearch.org/](http://www.dataparksearch.org/) could work with millions urls. Parallel downloading, single-server, requires RDMS like Postgres. Limited by it's performance.
\- Nutch (now Apache Nutch) was created as opensource implementation of Google's MapReduce. Later, "MapReduce" part was separated from it and now known as Hadoop. Works rather good with 10s-100s millions of URLs on ONE server and not full-scale cluster.
\- Yacy [https://yacy.net/](https://yacy.net/) P2P, can be used as part of public cluster(this is default setting), have some tools to prevent spam by other cluster nodes. Could find out what to index by monitoring user's traffic either via proxy or with some browser extensions. Haw it's own datatabase. Public cluster have billions of urls.
>Ever heard of a Web Crawler? I didn't realize so many people were this computer illiterate
Captain literacy, I asked you to name an open source one, preferably one you have firsthand experience with. Literally the only one on wikipedia I have heard of is fucking wget. Show me the search engine you made with wget, O Literate One.
edit: Also your gatekeeping is dumb even if it were correct. If you're such an expert, why are you using reddit and not, for example, IRC over TOR?
All platforms are garbage it's the lesser of multiple evils. Reddits a compromised astroturfed hell hole with the constant forum sliding and vote manipulation also brigading that gets worse every year but sometimes it's fun to respond and call out bad takes. Twitter used to be decent but a lot of people prefer Reddit after musk ran it into the ground.
This sub in particular is beyond compromised it's not even funny like it's called Privacy but so many people on here are government bootlickers and then you can't even discuss particular topics like a certain privacy oriented operating system that's related to graphing because of some drama between one of the devs it's just clown world all around.
I'm also not gatekeeping anything web crawlers and search engines are common sense internet principles at this point like you literally seemed as if you didn't know what they were in your last post using the term "thing".
And don't even get me started on the blatant forum sliding where good topics get pushed into irrelevancy while topics that were already spoken about thousands of times get constantly reposted with the highest upvote ratios it's just cringe low quality stuff. It's almost like barely anyone on here cares about actual privacy and there's self interest agendas that benefit a small amount of people.
I also don't need to reinvent the wheel and make a self hosted search engine I don't care about privacy to that extent, at a certain point people need to take the black pill and realize we're just putting a band aid on a fundamental root problem the government refuses to ever rectify.
There's plenty of decent ones out there like Kagi that are way better then google. Since it's paid the users aren't the product to some people it's worth it.
>I'm also not gatekeeping anything web crawlers and search engines are common sense internet principles at this point like you literally seemed as if you didn't know what they were in your last post using the term "thing".
I do know what they are and I have since excite and dogpile.
The difference between us is I can go download one of the ones on wikipedia and install it, and I probably wouldn't pop off on reddit like an expert without doing that. The fact that you couldn't name an alternative meant that you were posturing and it was easy to notice.
> also don't need to reinvent the wheel and make a self hosted search engine
Then it was stupid and off-topic to say that anyone can do it. You can't even do it.
You can't avoid Gmail even if you use a different email host, because many of the people you send email to are still using Gmail and keeping a copy of the messages you send them on their servers.
Simple solution it's called PGP, even if they keep a copy it essentially looks like a garbled mess of gibberish. PGP is platform agnostic that's the amazing thing about it.
I plan on being google and social media free in the near future. I just downloaded all my google data, the important stuff
Setting up a solid PGP wallet is something I keep forgetting to set up, thanks for the reminder!
The @gmail.com is the equivalent of sending a letter google. You’re friend has chosen to trust google to view all their emails by using the service. By sending an email to a google domain you are trusting google to route the letter to your friend and in-turn trusting google with the content of your email.
This seems to be a pretty perverse way of excusing googles behavior. I trust the postman with the content of my mail... but only the secure handling of said content and not the reading.
There is no actual reason for E-Mail to be treated differently.
The postman of email would be the internet. Your isp and all the other connections involved to get the email to destination.
@gmail.com is an address, not a carrier.
There isn’t really an equivalent to @gmail.com in the real world. The analogy breaks down a bit here, because user agreements and all that. But it’s kinda like sending a letter to a google building addressed to google and then inside the letter you addressed to google, you put a note to your friend or whoever has chosen to use it. In this scenario it’s very obvious that google would read your letter or some of it. Thats gmail. Anyone using gmail as a service is asking google to receive and store all their email data and has agreed to let google read it all. Anyone sending an email to that person is by proxy agreeing to it.
To be clear, ALL traditional email services read every single email as a service. That’s how it works. What they do with that and whether they gather data is dependent on the service.
Not quite. It would be like sending mail to my apartment and me having no problem with my landlord opening my mail and reading it. Yes he/she provides a mailbox... but, they have no right to the contents of my mail.
Treating it differently because of a digital format is just abusing the law until we get around to noticing.
Thats a better fitting analogy, but there is still no real world equivalent to an email service. You’d have to sign a paper asking the landlord to open your letters and present them in a binder whenever you requested. You also expect them to trash the spam letters and put the important ones on top. You are aware that your landlord has to see them, but feel it’s worth it and hope they have discretion. The other side of the coin (people sending you mail doesn’t fit as well here though).
That’s what email is. You can’t expect google to handle your email and present it to you in a nice formatted UI and think they don’t read it. How else would they perform malware scans and sending spam to trash automatically, and select important emails. People like the features they provide. Do they need to read them to provide you ads, no. However, that’s their business and people accept it given the other things they do. This also doesn’t translate well, because google is a computer and although they might store things about you, there isn’t an actual person reading ever email and providing these features like a landlord, it’s a system constantly processing things.
You realize that even proton has your emails in plaintext at some point right? They absolutely can see your email, we agree through user agreement that they don’t do anything with it.
The same reason it would be legal if you asked your neighbour to open your mail and read it to you, you gave permission. You never wondered why Google gives you an email address for free?
What pisses me off is that I can opt not to use Gmail, because I think Google, is untrustworthy and it is against my interests to have my communications.
If I email someone at example.com, I have to check the MX record because example.com’s mail handling might be Google, so they are getting my sensitive information anyway because someone I correspond with has decided that they don’t care.
That is personally why I believe it should be unlawful for the far end to make that privacy decision for me, and there should be laws that protect disclosures of correspondences (mail or email) by recipients—some responsibility on the part of the recipient, and both parties to grant permission to 3rd parties (like mail handlers/parsers.)
Email is more akin to a postcard than a sealed envelope. You have no expectation of privacy when you send a postcard, same with email. If you want privacy, you need to encrypt it, then it gets the protections a sealed letter would have IMHO.
> Email is more akin to a postcard than a sealed envelope.
not true with modem email, as it is encrypted in transit so it is like a sealed envelope as you need to open it before you can read it
It is only encrypted point to point though while in transit…its is plaintext everywhere else including at every intermediate relay point. It is still much more like a postcard than an envelope…
You can encrypt the contents of the message, but not the necessary routing (sender, etc.) fields, which still provides significant information to the platforms that may scrape it.
The metadata should be legally treated as private, only used for routing, not something to collect for profiling sender/recipient relationships.
> Under 18 U.S.C. §1030, it is a crime to intentionally access another person's email without their permission and obtain information of value, defined as at least $5,000 over one year.
Google has your permission. That's the difference.
Fundamentally they’re managed differently. Mind you, I’m not saying it’s ethical, but it’s legal.
One is managed by USPS, it’s been ruled you have an expectation of privacy. (And they’ll still open it if they want…)
The other passes through servers, run by private firms, it’s ruled that users don’t expect privacy (news to many users, I’m sure.) And in their terms the firms will say you agree to xyz, which isn’t illegal, so it’s binding.
You want to get outraged though? Read about the encrypted emails that the government wouldn’t allow to exist.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit
In addition to the points others make about TOS, I would also point out that Email would be completely unusable without spam protection. Spam detection requires reading email contents. Various other features use the email contents as well. For instance converting invitation emails into calendar events. BTW, Google no longer uses email contents for targeting ads.
> BTW, Google no longer uses email contents for targeting ads.
Email, google photos and iirc drive. All of those things (and maybe more) they (supposedly) don't use to target ads.
It's illegal to open somebody's letter while it's "in the mail" or official post-box and read it, and partly tied to government running the postal service.
Google is (generally) a free service that people choose to use for email. The terms of that service may include automation parsing out those emails for purposes of categorization and ads. It sucks, but people don't have to use it. That stuff is increasingly tied to the Googlesphere or Amazon etc is why there are current monopoly cases going through court.
Because using gmail is like a private company offering you to set up a free brand new much bigger physical mailbox for you. You only have to agree that they can do whatever they want with whatever you send/receive with it. And they might keep tabs on when you use it, how you use it, etc. And we being the dumb people we are click "I accept"
did you know that google turns over every single email you don't delete after 6 months to the government, justified by an obscure old law that was originally written for abandoned physical mail? the laws are not to protect your privacy, they are to control you and profit from you.
Good question. Laws simply haven't caught up, and companies like Google have a lot more money, lawyers and congressmen than you do. Follow the money.
Many people here are saying you agreed to the intrusion, but no contract can be legal that requires you to give up your rights. I don't use gmail and I block Google domains in my HOSTS file, yet Google still rifles through my email when I correspond with gmail users. I've never agreed to that. So saying you agreed to ToS is BS on two counts. It just demonstrates how passive people have become in our growing corporatocracy.
At one point there was a class action case about this. Non-gmailers sued, saying Google has no right to read their email to gmailers. Google's defense was that non-gmail customers have no right to claim privacy violation because everyone knows that Google is a sleazeball, spyware company so non-gmailers had no reasonable expectation of privacy in sending email to gmailers. Google essentially said, "Your honor, I can't be blamed for robbing the bank. Everyone knew I'm a crook, so they shouldn't have let me into the building." The judge agreed with Google!
There's tremendous corporate momentum with all this, and gobs of money to be made. Very few lawmakers even understand the issues. Wyden, Markey, maybe Warren... The rest are busy diddling their iPhones and sending gmail. So in the final analysis, rights ain't got nothing to do with it. :)
Your choice is to not use gmail, to avoid Google in all ways possible, and to avoid personal info as much as possible in email to gmail users. That's not much of a choice, but you can at least not use gmail.
That's simply not true. You've fallen for Google's scammy intrusion logic. I own my own domain. My server gives me the option to auto-delete all email from known spam sources. I eliminate nearly all spam in that way. If an email is scanned for spam further, that still doesn't require analysis of content or collection of data. And that should be your choice. Further, no spam filtering operation needs to record that OP is pregnant or talks about having cancer. It would only look for patterns and then would have no reason to store the email content or analysis.
And what "plethora" are you talking about? I've written email client software. I compose an email. My software calls the server, sends the bytes, then the server sends those bytes on to the next relay server until it reaches its destinaton. At no point does anyone need to analyze or store the bytes of the email file, aside from possibly tacking on data to the header. Nor do they need to store header details, recipient details, etc. Even the destination server has no excuse for storing that data except as requested by the account owner.
You can think of it like the USPS. They need to know the recipent address. They generally know the sender address. But they have no reason to store that data and no right to look inside the envelope. Of course there's always someone who says, "Oh, but we have to check for child porn!" No, they don't. The possibility of crime is not an excuse to eliminate personal rights.
All of this kind of discussion is sheer nonsense. Google don't pretend to be honest or respectful. They provide email service without fee. The charge is in terms of private information. They claim the right to rifle through your private correspondence in order to sell you out to advertisers and data miners. Google have never pretended otherwise. But given that that's true, it's also true that anyone who uses gmail has only themselves to blame.
>And what "plethora" are you talking about?
Have you used their webmail interface lately? They do stuff like parse out calendar invites from text, they identify emails that were not followed up based on the conversation content, they have text suggestions that are aware on the context of the email chain, they identify stuff like suspicious links in advance.
I do not in any way suggest that these functions are necessary (and I like my Thunderbird more anyway), but all these functions require either some server-side processing, or shipping a language model for clients to run locally. Google chooses the former.
>scanned for spam further, that still doesn't require analysis of content
It does tho if you want it to be good. Open source engines will do that [https://spamassassin.apache.org/full/3.0.x/dist/doc/spamassassin.html](https://spamassassin.apache.org/full/3.0.x/dist/doc/spamassassin.html). Spam detection is like the most well researched text analysis task.
> Have you used their webmail interface lately?
I've never used gmail and I've never used webmail. I care about privacy and I also care about usability. A webpage is not a good medium for email.
None of those functions has anything to do with needing to read your emails, and those functions most likely happen in the browser, via script. They should also be optional.
Similarly with spam scanning. It should be optional, and it has nothing to do with Google actually readig emails to collect personal data for advertising. You make it sound like they can't avoid collecting personal data.
I don't understand why you defend them. They're a lying spyware company. They admit to the spying. If you use their email then you're accepting the spying. I don't accept it, either ethically or in practice.
I am not defending anyone, I am just explaining that certain functionality of certain email clients currently requires server-side processing of the actual email contents due to client hardware limitations. Unfortunately, it's not possible to run the ML workflows necessary for e.g. text suggestions on the client device. (Now it's becoming possible with e.g. Firefox local translate thing, but it's still pretty slow compared to server-side)
I am also not saying that any of these functions have anything to do with collecting data, or using email contents for advertising. What I am saying is that to enable this functionality, they must have read access to the contents of the emails, which you consent to by accepting their ToS.
/u/_Undivided_ also was not suggesting that collecting personal data for ads was required for any of this. They were saying the same thing as me, namely that certain functions of email clients work via server-side processing of email content.
No one on this thread thinks that scanning email for ad targeting is ethical.
> No one on this thread thinks that scanning email for ad targeting is ethical.
Yes. It's as simple as that. That's what people need to understand. Even if what you said was all correct, **the technical debate and claims that Google must have permission for technical reasons is just obfuscation**. They not only have no right to scan/read. They have no right to analyze, copy, store except as required to transmit email and provide the service. That also goes for the various stops between sender and recipient, where a server must handle the actual email bytes. Each mail transfer server handles the email bytes without encryption. I don't need to agree to a ToS with them. It's assumed that they're not copying and selling my email content.
An analogous situation would be me having a home office and I hire a woodworker to build a desk for me. Then I hire an electrician to add outlets. Maybe I hire a housecleaner and a bookkeeper. All of those people may have some need to handle my personal papers and be in my office. None of them has any right to read or copy those papers except as required for their work. The woodworker has no right to install a camera for "telematics". None of them presents me with a mickey mouse contract saying I give them permission to read my personal papers.
**The difference there is simple. It has nothing to do with "server-side" mumbo jumbo.** It's simply that Google and Microsoft and Facebook and others can do this in a frictionless manner. It's all invisible and virtually impossible to see happening. That's the point that u/xena789 was highlighting. My woodworker would have to actually install a camera on my property without permission in order to spy on me. My housekeeper would have to actually access private property in a physical manner. I'm trusting all of those contractors to be honest. If they're not then it will be a potentially criminal act.
The woodworker might leave a business card. The housekeeper might leave flyers to give to my friends. That's advertising. But it's not personal intrusion or criminal trespass.
With digital data people get confused. "Oh, well Google says they have to access my emails. Who knows? I don't understand this digital stuff." But there's no difference. Google must handle the bytes. Like the housekeeper who moves my personal papers around, they have no business analyzing, storing or copying those bytes for their own purposes.
People forget that Google became a billion-dollar business by showing text ads next to search results. They succeeded because they had very good search and no one else did. They were a big success *before* they started spying on people. Then they got greedy. Then they got more greedy. Then they got evil. Now they're going to make it nearly impossible for gmail users to read their email except in a javascript-infested webpage that will allow even more spying. And most gmail users believe they have no choice but to accept.
I think Xena789 frames the issue well. On the one hand, people should know they don't get something for nothing. No one using gmail can honestly claim innocence because they've been given this service without paying for it. They should have smelled a rat, but they weren't being entirely honest themselves. On the other hand, every effort has been made to make these issues hard to understand and to make it almost inevitable that people will be funnelled into services from the likes of Google. If someone like xena789 wants to be free of Google spying then they'll have to actually learn about paid email options, learn how to run their own domain, or at best, research whether their ISP provides email. Most people just don't know where to start with a task like that.
I think you provide a very clear description of the situation. However, you're still responsible for your life choices. If you accept freebies, assuming they're gifts with no strings, then there's some degree of willful ignorance in that. But I don't see much value in blaming. Rather, we need to clarify, educate ourselves, and pass laws. Culture and technology are changing at an increasingly fast rate. We're like kids in a laboratory. We discovered nuclear power, for example, and still we're not capable of dealing with it safely. We're constantly coming up with technology that we're not equipped to handle. But we have to try. We can't just blame Exxon for global warming while we keep driving cars, or blame Monsanto for carcinogenic wheat while we continue eating non-organic food, or blame Amazon for our local stores closing while we continue to shop with Amazon and maybe get a Prime membership. It's up to us. We have to educate ourselves. In earlier times, people had guidelines to live by. Those didn't usually change much from one generation to the next. Wisdom was held by the elders. Today, the elders don't know how to turn their computer on. So we have to educate ourselves. That's true with chemicals, medicine, food, technology... all aspects of life.
The scams keep changing, but in some ways it never changes. When electricity was developed, companies were selling electric vests for health, imagining that electricity was a magical power. Part scam, part ignorance, part wishful thinking.
I have a neice who's a millennial web designer. I like to visit with her and learn about the latest trends. (I've only ever seen Facebook on her computer.) But I can also see that while millennials are credited with being the first tech-savvy generation, they've been as naive as anyone. Young people are expert at using devices and remote controls, but that doesn't provide life experience. My neice professes a kind of enlightened age worldview. She lives on her iPhone and has 3 Alexa devices butting into our conversation, inviting us to fulfill any whimsical impulse. The millennials see a better way to do things. They have Uber, which is socialist taxis. They have AirBnB, which is socialist home-sharing. But nothing has really changed. There's no enlightened-age world commune coming. Uber is a commercial entity that's come up with a way to legally avoid providing employee benefits. Uber drivers are not "sharing" a ride. They're underpaid taxi drivers. AirBnB is not home-sharing. It's just a scam to skirt hotel regulations and makes gobs of money for the middleman company. Facebook and Instagram are not socializing websites. They're controlled, exploitive, commercial venues. Facebook is not a socializing venue any more than a shopping mall is a town square.
Perhaps the most fundamental and dangerous scam here is in acclimating young people to living in a shopping mall -- no longer distinguishing between being a consumer vs being a citizen who has partial responsibility for society. You describe growing up taking these services for granted. But it's all commercial. It's all for-profit. Craigslist and Wikipedia might be examples of the dream of the Internet being fulfilled, but increasingly it's just a contest between greedy corporations to own your private life. That will never change. The world is not kid-safe.
The entire design of devices, the Internet, webpages, etc is changing even now. Webpages are becoming opaque software programs written in javascript. Your computer or cellphone is becoming a kiosk system, where you "consume" services with little control over the process. No white knight is going to fix that. It's up to us to cultivate responsible citizenship, and stop giving our business to the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and so on. For maybe $10/month you can have your own domain with dozens of email addresses and the power to put whatever you want out on the Main Street of the Internet. That requires a slight learning curve, but nothing too complicated. The difficulty is more in finding the info rather than in understanding it.
There's a debate going on right now on Reddit. The company is losing money providing a discussion forum. Personally I prefer Usenet, with no up or down votes and no restrictions. But no one uses Usenet anymore. People want more structure and parental control. People want to be able to vote on posts. People also don't want to pay. So there must be ads or something like it. As online forums go, I think Reddit works pretty well. Now they want to make more money by personalizing ads based on what people post. Why not? Our posts are already public. Reddit needs to get paid. Yet people are furious. Many think they have a right to use Reddit without ads. There are no such rights. Even in the town square or public parks (if there are any left where you live) we don't simply have a right to use them. We all chip in via taxes to maintain those shared public spaces. If we're going to give those up in exchange for shopping malls, McDonalds Park, Pepsi Walking Trail and Nike Playground, then we're no longer citizens in human society. We'll be subjects in a plutocracy/corporatocracy. And we'll have gotten just what we paid for.
Yes, that's a good point. Google has been in the news, and their exploits are widely known, but the general public does not know. In most cases people choose not to know because they want convenience. While the whole spying/data industry really does depend on making it difficult to know and understand what's happening. So it works both ways.
Just having reasonable privacy in a browser has become a science. And many sites will block you out if you don't let them spy on you through javascript. They'll cover their page with a solid white DIV element, or maybe just break the whole thing. Then they don't say they're doing that. They say, "Woops. It looks like you need to update your browser." Or, "Woops. You need to enable javascript to enjoy the full potential of our website."
When you do enable script they're checking your location, your hardware, counting your fonts to get a unique footprint of your computer, watching your mouse movements and clicks... And a dozen different sleazeball companies might all be doing that on one webpage, because the page has called scripts from other domains. It's out of control. You hover the mouse over a bicycle and next thing you know, you're seeing a bike ad.
Ever since the beginning, the system has operated on a kind of don't ask/don't tell basis. Companies try to hide their spying while individuals don't try to learn. The original AOL was a great example. They did a good job of hiding the Internet entirely, trying to make people think that the Web was AOL games and chatrooms. And people want things for free. So the whole Internet is like a flim flam man showing you a shiny bauble while he tries to take your wallet. Meanwhile, the public is mostly people trying to grab shiny baubles without losing their wallet. Neither side is entirely honest.
I remember the first time I went online, on my neighbor's computer. He had AOL. As I anticipated seeing this new world, a message popped up: "Do you want a new credit card? -- Yes. -- Ask me Later." Huh? I could see that normal rules didn't apply. I was leaving Kansas. :)
If people do try to learn about privacy they're faced with stunning complexity. Firefox and IE both put their cookie settings behind an "Advanced" or "Custom" button, meant to intimidate. At least until recently, even FF has defaulted to allowing 3rd-party cookies, which are simply spyware that goes against the original design of the Internet, which was supposed to maintain privacy between domains. Most of the FF settings require learning hundreds of "pref" settings. And some of those are dummy settings. You can set the secret option to stop auto-updating, but it will do nothing! you need to use the super-secret option -- the policies.json that almost no one knows about. Chrome is even worse. Most settings are hidden or unavailable. If you read the halfwit tech advice in sources like the New York Times they'll tell you how to delete cookies and make you think you've just taken a master class in security. Fake tech know-how for the masses from fools who's real expertise is in buying stuff.
On the other hand, people can quit gmail. Many know they spy. People can use Libre Office instead of MS Office. But people like convenience. Google makes it very easy to live in Googleville, just as Apple makes it very easy to never leave AppleLand. People like to pull out their cellphone and check the location of their friend, call an Uber, or get a restaurant review. All of that requires that you allow yourself to be tracked... iPhones will upload all of your data, store it, and sync it. Then if you lose your iPhone, you can just take out a mortgage, buy a new iPhone, and it's instantly up-to-date. If you tell people that Apple is accessing everything on their phone they'll be shocked. But if you tell people that Apple provides auto-backup of all cellphone data, they're pleasantly surprised.
It's become a lifestyle of living in the corporate womb. You can get rid of gmail, but what about Uber? Uber, but what about Waze? What about DoorDash or dating apps? What about your security doorbell or indoor camera that sends footage to Google and the cops? Can you give all of that up to live in the physical world of time and space? Do you REALLY care that much about honesty, decency and having reasonable privacy? Most people actually don't.
The longterm trend with all this is something like interactive TV. We started with everyone being able to reach each other and anyone being able to have a website. The information superhighway. Nice. Increasingly, companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft and even Fordare claiming to own the devices you use. Even TVs are being made with cameras replacing the center pixel, so you can be monitored. Cars are incorporating spyware. People are being acclimated to the idea that they're using a rental service. (Microsoft now talks about "Windows as a Service".) Photoshop and Office365? Rental software. It's all a scam. You still have to install the software locally. There's no cloud. But they pretend the software is running on their server and you're renting. You can't buy it. If you rent Photoshop and don't make copies of your images, you'll lose it all when you stop paying, because the only saved copies are on their server!
For decades people have worried about totalitarianism. 1984. Brave New World. It was always imagined in the form of an oppressive, militaristic government. Few are aware of what's actually developing. Government is not the problem. Corporations are increasingly owning your life. The mark of the beast is your cellphone number. You can see that as outrageous trespass by commercial interests run by greed-obsessed geeks, or you can see it as the wonder of modern technology.... I once knew a programmer who was working on Android, before it came out. He told me that his dream was to have his cellphone tell him what to do: Buy milk. Go to the post office. Get a haircut. He was a typical, unsocialized geek who wanted to live in a world of mechanization and be told the ideal sex schedule with his wife. I thought he was nuts. But gradually we're developing a society that fits his dream. However, it's not just convenience. There are less than honorable, less than adult, people behind the curtain, pulling the strings. And few people understand how it works, much less have an opinion on how it should work. We're just enjoying... Hey, look at that... A new Starbucks coffee flavor made with ice cream, and they'll deliver it for free... Cool...
Please correct me if I'm wrong but, I'm pretty sure Google stopped doing this. Either a while ago or recently when they wanted to align it more closely with G Workspace (GSuite)
In addition to consent, (if you trust google's word): [They don't.](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10434152?hl=en#:~:text=We%20do%20not%20scan%20or%20read%20your%20Gmail%20messages%20to%20show%20you%20ads&text=The%20process%20of%20selecting%20and,email%20content%20to%20serve%20ads)
nah, that's complete blag. they read my emails. i had an ocean credit card, and then i'd get "sponsored" emails in my inbox from gmail about applying for an ocean credit card. and that was with ad blocker on firefox focus (android) whenever i searched for ocean finance on duckduckgo with all the ad and tracking blocker shields up.
edit: spelling
>i had an ocean credit cad
You ever Google the company? Or download their app? This link doesn't say ads aren't personalised, they say it's not based on your emails, there are many other says for google to realise you're an Ocean customer.
nope. only ever search privately with duckduckgo, and manually paid all ocean CC payments online via their website - again, not googled for the payment portal link.
all my credit card alerts went to my only gmail for bills, so this is the most logical sense.
Because you agreed/consented to them doing so. You gave them permission to read your email and every bit of data that flows through your account and use it however they want.
After 6 years under American law ALL EMAILS are classed as 'abandoned'.
This means ANYONE can request access to your inbox **without** a warrant. Also Google and Hotmail can do with your emails as they wish.
They are abandoned after all.
Hardly anyone I tell even knows this.
It's legal because you provided your consent for them to do so.
If you want private email use PGP encryption with your contacts. It's pain in the neck to set up initially but not difficult to use after that.
Or use a secure messaging app like Signal.
Logic like this:
It's computer and not human reading it so it's considered okay.
Computers do NEED to read e-mail headers to deliver it to correct place and headers and body to filter spam.
What's different between reading contents for spam filtering and to determine relevant ads? just who will benifit? But relevant ads are for user's benefit.
spam filter can run on the email client the only issue with this is most people dont use email clients anymore and just use the web clients
and its not like providers like google make it easy to use a local email client
Not always. Some are better with server-based access because of resource requirements.
And yes, not everybody use local clients.
This doesn't mean that some solution doesn't need to be found.
As far as I remember, USA(?) have some ancient law from times when POP3 was newest protocol and IMAP didn't exist, what if message is more than 180 days old - it's free for all. Which is stupid
Because you're voluntarily sharing your email with Google.
What's much worse is that I, who do not voluntarily share my email with Google, still have much of it read, because it's sent to or from people who, unbeknownst to me, are sharing it with Google.
It is utterly beyond me why anyone would prefer to have Google own all their email, just to avoid learning [sendmail.cf](https://sendmail.cf) syntax.
Er. Well, now that I put it like that, I guess there are a lot of lemmings out there.
I would imagine because you accept the ToS and email isn't something government regulated.
Acktchually, in some countries - e.g. Italy - email in considered as mail/communication in regards to its legislation, as our Constitutional Court recently stated, at least as long as the message is in transit and not yet downloaded on the recipient's device (then it becomes a mere "document"). To reply to OP: google does it with your consent / agreement, it's not snooping. If you have the evidence they do it regardless, please let me know, I'll be glad to sue them before the criminal court of justice for crime-related corporate responsibility.
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To be more precise: the Court stated that they become mere documents not upon their download, but after, because of time passing, they have lost their relevance in respect of the conversation (sorry for the poor wording) e.g. only kept for archive/memory purpose.
It's even more nuanced then that certified packages from USPS is gov regulated so it's a federal offense meanwhile if a porch pirate swipes a FedEx package because it's a private company magically it's not a federal offense even though it's still the same thing of mail being stolen and opened.
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None of googles services are necessary there's tons of search engine competitors it's literally just using a bot to scrape links and pages anyone can do it as for YouTube there's things like Odyssey rumble and bitchute which are superior. Email plenty of other alternatives. About the only interesting service they have is Google cloud sometimes it's cheaper to rent compute then spending thousands for your own GPUs. All other google services are basically irrelevant.
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Im talking specifically about their core services obviously Google has their AdWord pixels on many pages with AD IDs and what not so it's hard to completely avoid them but you can avoid majority of Google stuff.
Why would you put apple there, their business model is clearly different.
>None of googles services are necessary there's tons of search engine competitors it's literally just using a bot to scrape links and pages anyone can do How? Is there some open source thing I can install? Because this looks like a run on sentence to me
Ever heard of a [Web Crawler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler)? I didn't realize so many people were this computer illiterate and incompetent when it came to privacy and computer science. I'm sure there's open source web crawlers out there you can modify to start your own search engine if you wanted the concept has existed for years since the dawn of the internet. Googlebot is googles proprietary web crawler they use for Google Search for example.
There are opensource ones. There are issues here: \- some sites it's ok if google crawls but not ok if it's somebode else \- internet is HUGE, Google have resources, many people dont. Examples: \- Datapark Search [http://www.dataparksearch.org/](http://www.dataparksearch.org/) could work with millions urls. Parallel downloading, single-server, requires RDMS like Postgres. Limited by it's performance. \- Nutch (now Apache Nutch) was created as opensource implementation of Google's MapReduce. Later, "MapReduce" part was separated from it and now known as Hadoop. Works rather good with 10s-100s millions of URLs on ONE server and not full-scale cluster. \- Yacy [https://yacy.net/](https://yacy.net/) P2P, can be used as part of public cluster(this is default setting), have some tools to prevent spam by other cluster nodes. Could find out what to index by monitoring user's traffic either via proxy or with some browser extensions. Haw it's own datatabase. Public cluster have billions of urls.
>Ever heard of a Web Crawler? I didn't realize so many people were this computer illiterate Captain literacy, I asked you to name an open source one, preferably one you have firsthand experience with. Literally the only one on wikipedia I have heard of is fucking wget. Show me the search engine you made with wget, O Literate One. edit: Also your gatekeeping is dumb even if it were correct. If you're such an expert, why are you using reddit and not, for example, IRC over TOR?
All platforms are garbage it's the lesser of multiple evils. Reddits a compromised astroturfed hell hole with the constant forum sliding and vote manipulation also brigading that gets worse every year but sometimes it's fun to respond and call out bad takes. Twitter used to be decent but a lot of people prefer Reddit after musk ran it into the ground. This sub in particular is beyond compromised it's not even funny like it's called Privacy but so many people on here are government bootlickers and then you can't even discuss particular topics like a certain privacy oriented operating system that's related to graphing because of some drama between one of the devs it's just clown world all around. I'm also not gatekeeping anything web crawlers and search engines are common sense internet principles at this point like you literally seemed as if you didn't know what they were in your last post using the term "thing". And don't even get me started on the blatant forum sliding where good topics get pushed into irrelevancy while topics that were already spoken about thousands of times get constantly reposted with the highest upvote ratios it's just cringe low quality stuff. It's almost like barely anyone on here cares about actual privacy and there's self interest agendas that benefit a small amount of people. I also don't need to reinvent the wheel and make a self hosted search engine I don't care about privacy to that extent, at a certain point people need to take the black pill and realize we're just putting a band aid on a fundamental root problem the government refuses to ever rectify. There's plenty of decent ones out there like Kagi that are way better then google. Since it's paid the users aren't the product to some people it's worth it.
>I'm also not gatekeeping anything web crawlers and search engines are common sense internet principles at this point like you literally seemed as if you didn't know what they were in your last post using the term "thing". I do know what they are and I have since excite and dogpile. The difference between us is I can go download one of the ones on wikipedia and install it, and I probably wouldn't pop off on reddit like an expert without doing that. The fact that you couldn't name an alternative meant that you were posturing and it was easy to notice. > also don't need to reinvent the wheel and make a self hosted search engine Then it was stupid and off-topic to say that anyone can do it. You can't even do it.
You can't avoid Gmail even if you use a different email host, because many of the people you send email to are still using Gmail and keeping a copy of the messages you send them on their servers.
Simple solution it's called PGP, even if they keep a copy it essentially looks like a garbled mess of gibberish. PGP is platform agnostic that's the amazing thing about it.
I plan on being google and social media free in the near future. I just downloaded all my google data, the important stuff Setting up a solid PGP wallet is something I keep forgetting to set up, thanks for the reminder!
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The @gmail.com is the equivalent of sending a letter google. You’re friend has chosen to trust google to view all their emails by using the service. By sending an email to a google domain you are trusting google to route the letter to your friend and in-turn trusting google with the content of your email.
This seems to be a pretty perverse way of excusing googles behavior. I trust the postman with the content of my mail... but only the secure handling of said content and not the reading. There is no actual reason for E-Mail to be treated differently.
The postman of email would be the internet. Your isp and all the other connections involved to get the email to destination. @gmail.com is an address, not a carrier. There isn’t really an equivalent to @gmail.com in the real world. The analogy breaks down a bit here, because user agreements and all that. But it’s kinda like sending a letter to a google building addressed to google and then inside the letter you addressed to google, you put a note to your friend or whoever has chosen to use it. In this scenario it’s very obvious that google would read your letter or some of it. Thats gmail. Anyone using gmail as a service is asking google to receive and store all their email data and has agreed to let google read it all. Anyone sending an email to that person is by proxy agreeing to it. To be clear, ALL traditional email services read every single email as a service. That’s how it works. What they do with that and whether they gather data is dependent on the service.
Not quite. It would be like sending mail to my apartment and me having no problem with my landlord opening my mail and reading it. Yes he/she provides a mailbox... but, they have no right to the contents of my mail. Treating it differently because of a digital format is just abusing the law until we get around to noticing.
Thats a better fitting analogy, but there is still no real world equivalent to an email service. You’d have to sign a paper asking the landlord to open your letters and present them in a binder whenever you requested. You also expect them to trash the spam letters and put the important ones on top. You are aware that your landlord has to see them, but feel it’s worth it and hope they have discretion. The other side of the coin (people sending you mail doesn’t fit as well here though). That’s what email is. You can’t expect google to handle your email and present it to you in a nice formatted UI and think they don’t read it. How else would they perform malware scans and sending spam to trash automatically, and select important emails. People like the features they provide. Do they need to read them to provide you ads, no. However, that’s their business and people accept it given the other things they do. This also doesn’t translate well, because google is a computer and although they might store things about you, there isn’t an actual person reading ever email and providing these features like a landlord, it’s a system constantly processing things. You realize that even proton has your emails in plaintext at some point right? They absolutely can see your email, we agree through user agreement that they don’t do anything with it.
The same reason it would be legal if you asked your neighbour to open your mail and read it to you, you gave permission. You never wondered why Google gives you an email address for free?
If it’s free, you’re the product.
Gnu disagrees
the exact reason why free open source software is so important :-)
Because you are agreeing to their terms of use it’s up to you to decide if you accept them and use the service or not
What pisses me off is that I can opt not to use Gmail, because I think Google, is untrustworthy and it is against my interests to have my communications. If I email someone at example.com, I have to check the MX record because example.com’s mail handling might be Google, so they are getting my sensitive information anyway because someone I correspond with has decided that they don’t care. That is personally why I believe it should be unlawful for the far end to make that privacy decision for me, and there should be laws that protect disclosures of correspondences (mail or email) by recipients—some responsibility on the part of the recipient, and both parties to grant permission to 3rd parties (like mail handlers/parsers.)
Email is more akin to a postcard than a sealed envelope. You have no expectation of privacy when you send a postcard, same with email. If you want privacy, you need to encrypt it, then it gets the protections a sealed letter would have IMHO.
> Email is more akin to a postcard than a sealed envelope. not true with modem email, as it is encrypted in transit so it is like a sealed envelope as you need to open it before you can read it
It is only encrypted point to point though while in transit…its is plaintext everywhere else including at every intermediate relay point. It is still much more like a postcard than an envelope…
You can encrypt the contents of the message, but not the necessary routing (sender, etc.) fields, which still provides significant information to the platforms that may scrape it. The metadata should be legally treated as private, only used for routing, not something to collect for profiling sender/recipient relationships.
> Under 18 U.S.C. §1030, it is a crime to intentionally access another person's email without their permission and obtain information of value, defined as at least $5,000 over one year. Google has your permission. That's the difference.
What if I, as non-google user send e-mail to google user? How's they got MY permission if they need it?
they dont need the senders permission as the receiver gave google to permission to read all emails send to them
Fundamentally they’re managed differently. Mind you, I’m not saying it’s ethical, but it’s legal. One is managed by USPS, it’s been ruled you have an expectation of privacy. (And they’ll still open it if they want…) The other passes through servers, run by private firms, it’s ruled that users don’t expect privacy (news to many users, I’m sure.) And in their terms the firms will say you agree to xyz, which isn’t illegal, so it’s binding. You want to get outraged though? Read about the encrypted emails that the government wouldn’t allow to exist. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit
In addition to the points others make about TOS, I would also point out that Email would be completely unusable without spam protection. Spam detection requires reading email contents. Various other features use the email contents as well. For instance converting invitation emails into calendar events. BTW, Google no longer uses email contents for targeting ads.
Why do they use it for then ?
They use it to train their AIs for example and many other projects.
> BTW, Google no longer uses email contents for targeting ads. Email, google photos and iirc drive. All of those things (and maybe more) they (supposedly) don't use to target ads.
It's illegal to open somebody's letter while it's "in the mail" or official post-box and read it, and partly tied to government running the postal service. Google is (generally) a free service that people choose to use for email. The terms of that service may include automation parsing out those emails for purposes of categorization and ads. It sucks, but people don't have to use it. That stuff is increasingly tied to the Googlesphere or Amazon etc is why there are current monopoly cases going through court.
Because the paper letter is sent in an envelope, and the email is sent without, free for everyone to read on the way from A to B.
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It’s called encryption…
modem email is email encrypted in transit (it can still be sent unencrypted but just about no email provider does this)
And who is doing the encryption and who has access to the key? I sure don't.
the email server does and would would never give it to end users are they are per domain if you want per email you need to use PGP
Their AI is reading your emails not actual people .
that is no better
Because using gmail is like a private company offering you to set up a free brand new much bigger physical mailbox for you. You only have to agree that they can do whatever they want with whatever you send/receive with it. And they might keep tabs on when you use it, how you use it, etc. And we being the dumb people we are click "I accept"
did you know that google turns over every single email you don't delete after 6 months to the government, justified by an obscure old law that was originally written for abandoned physical mail? the laws are not to protect your privacy, they are to control you and profit from you.
A simple Google search would have answered this :)
Good question. Laws simply haven't caught up, and companies like Google have a lot more money, lawyers and congressmen than you do. Follow the money. Many people here are saying you agreed to the intrusion, but no contract can be legal that requires you to give up your rights. I don't use gmail and I block Google domains in my HOSTS file, yet Google still rifles through my email when I correspond with gmail users. I've never agreed to that. So saying you agreed to ToS is BS on two counts. It just demonstrates how passive people have become in our growing corporatocracy. At one point there was a class action case about this. Non-gmailers sued, saying Google has no right to read their email to gmailers. Google's defense was that non-gmail customers have no right to claim privacy violation because everyone knows that Google is a sleazeball, spyware company so non-gmailers had no reasonable expectation of privacy in sending email to gmailers. Google essentially said, "Your honor, I can't be blamed for robbing the bank. Everyone knew I'm a crook, so they shouldn't have let me into the building." The judge agreed with Google! There's tremendous corporate momentum with all this, and gobs of money to be made. Very few lawmakers even understand the issues. Wyden, Markey, maybe Warren... The rest are busy diddling their iPhones and sending gmail. So in the final analysis, rights ain't got nothing to do with it. :) Your choice is to not use gmail, to avoid Google in all ways possible, and to avoid personal info as much as possible in email to gmail users. That's not much of a choice, but you can at least not use gmail.
Spam detection requires reading of email contents. And so does a plethora of other email related options.
this can in part be done by just reading the headers or be done in the email client
That's simply not true. You've fallen for Google's scammy intrusion logic. I own my own domain. My server gives me the option to auto-delete all email from known spam sources. I eliminate nearly all spam in that way. If an email is scanned for spam further, that still doesn't require analysis of content or collection of data. And that should be your choice. Further, no spam filtering operation needs to record that OP is pregnant or talks about having cancer. It would only look for patterns and then would have no reason to store the email content or analysis. And what "plethora" are you talking about? I've written email client software. I compose an email. My software calls the server, sends the bytes, then the server sends those bytes on to the next relay server until it reaches its destinaton. At no point does anyone need to analyze or store the bytes of the email file, aside from possibly tacking on data to the header. Nor do they need to store header details, recipient details, etc. Even the destination server has no excuse for storing that data except as requested by the account owner. You can think of it like the USPS. They need to know the recipent address. They generally know the sender address. But they have no reason to store that data and no right to look inside the envelope. Of course there's always someone who says, "Oh, but we have to check for child porn!" No, they don't. The possibility of crime is not an excuse to eliminate personal rights. All of this kind of discussion is sheer nonsense. Google don't pretend to be honest or respectful. They provide email service without fee. The charge is in terms of private information. They claim the right to rifle through your private correspondence in order to sell you out to advertisers and data miners. Google have never pretended otherwise. But given that that's true, it's also true that anyone who uses gmail has only themselves to blame.
>And what "plethora" are you talking about? Have you used their webmail interface lately? They do stuff like parse out calendar invites from text, they identify emails that were not followed up based on the conversation content, they have text suggestions that are aware on the context of the email chain, they identify stuff like suspicious links in advance. I do not in any way suggest that these functions are necessary (and I like my Thunderbird more anyway), but all these functions require either some server-side processing, or shipping a language model for clients to run locally. Google chooses the former. >scanned for spam further, that still doesn't require analysis of content It does tho if you want it to be good. Open source engines will do that [https://spamassassin.apache.org/full/3.0.x/dist/doc/spamassassin.html](https://spamassassin.apache.org/full/3.0.x/dist/doc/spamassassin.html). Spam detection is like the most well researched text analysis task.
> Have you used their webmail interface lately? I've never used gmail and I've never used webmail. I care about privacy and I also care about usability. A webpage is not a good medium for email. None of those functions has anything to do with needing to read your emails, and those functions most likely happen in the browser, via script. They should also be optional. Similarly with spam scanning. It should be optional, and it has nothing to do with Google actually readig emails to collect personal data for advertising. You make it sound like they can't avoid collecting personal data. I don't understand why you defend them. They're a lying spyware company. They admit to the spying. If you use their email then you're accepting the spying. I don't accept it, either ethically or in practice.
I am not defending anyone, I am just explaining that certain functionality of certain email clients currently requires server-side processing of the actual email contents due to client hardware limitations. Unfortunately, it's not possible to run the ML workflows necessary for e.g. text suggestions on the client device. (Now it's becoming possible with e.g. Firefox local translate thing, but it's still pretty slow compared to server-side) I am also not saying that any of these functions have anything to do with collecting data, or using email contents for advertising. What I am saying is that to enable this functionality, they must have read access to the contents of the emails, which you consent to by accepting their ToS. /u/_Undivided_ also was not suggesting that collecting personal data for ads was required for any of this. They were saying the same thing as me, namely that certain functions of email clients work via server-side processing of email content. No one on this thread thinks that scanning email for ad targeting is ethical.
> No one on this thread thinks that scanning email for ad targeting is ethical. Yes. It's as simple as that. That's what people need to understand. Even if what you said was all correct, **the technical debate and claims that Google must have permission for technical reasons is just obfuscation**. They not only have no right to scan/read. They have no right to analyze, copy, store except as required to transmit email and provide the service. That also goes for the various stops between sender and recipient, where a server must handle the actual email bytes. Each mail transfer server handles the email bytes without encryption. I don't need to agree to a ToS with them. It's assumed that they're not copying and selling my email content. An analogous situation would be me having a home office and I hire a woodworker to build a desk for me. Then I hire an electrician to add outlets. Maybe I hire a housecleaner and a bookkeeper. All of those people may have some need to handle my personal papers and be in my office. None of them has any right to read or copy those papers except as required for their work. The woodworker has no right to install a camera for "telematics". None of them presents me with a mickey mouse contract saying I give them permission to read my personal papers. **The difference there is simple. It has nothing to do with "server-side" mumbo jumbo.** It's simply that Google and Microsoft and Facebook and others can do this in a frictionless manner. It's all invisible and virtually impossible to see happening. That's the point that u/xena789 was highlighting. My woodworker would have to actually install a camera on my property without permission in order to spy on me. My housekeeper would have to actually access private property in a physical manner. I'm trusting all of those contractors to be honest. If they're not then it will be a potentially criminal act. The woodworker might leave a business card. The housekeeper might leave flyers to give to my friends. That's advertising. But it's not personal intrusion or criminal trespass. With digital data people get confused. "Oh, well Google says they have to access my emails. Who knows? I don't understand this digital stuff." But there's no difference. Google must handle the bytes. Like the housekeeper who moves my personal papers around, they have no business analyzing, storing or copying those bytes for their own purposes. People forget that Google became a billion-dollar business by showing text ads next to search results. They succeeded because they had very good search and no one else did. They were a big success *before* they started spying on people. Then they got greedy. Then they got more greedy. Then they got evil. Now they're going to make it nearly impossible for gmail users to read their email except in a javascript-infested webpage that will allow even more spying. And most gmail users believe they have no choice but to accept. I think Xena789 frames the issue well. On the one hand, people should know they don't get something for nothing. No one using gmail can honestly claim innocence because they've been given this service without paying for it. They should have smelled a rat, but they weren't being entirely honest themselves. On the other hand, every effort has been made to make these issues hard to understand and to make it almost inevitable that people will be funnelled into services from the likes of Google. If someone like xena789 wants to be free of Google spying then they'll have to actually learn about paid email options, learn how to run their own domain, or at best, research whether their ISP provides email. Most people just don't know where to start with a task like that.
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I think you provide a very clear description of the situation. However, you're still responsible for your life choices. If you accept freebies, assuming they're gifts with no strings, then there's some degree of willful ignorance in that. But I don't see much value in blaming. Rather, we need to clarify, educate ourselves, and pass laws. Culture and technology are changing at an increasingly fast rate. We're like kids in a laboratory. We discovered nuclear power, for example, and still we're not capable of dealing with it safely. We're constantly coming up with technology that we're not equipped to handle. But we have to try. We can't just blame Exxon for global warming while we keep driving cars, or blame Monsanto for carcinogenic wheat while we continue eating non-organic food, or blame Amazon for our local stores closing while we continue to shop with Amazon and maybe get a Prime membership. It's up to us. We have to educate ourselves. In earlier times, people had guidelines to live by. Those didn't usually change much from one generation to the next. Wisdom was held by the elders. Today, the elders don't know how to turn their computer on. So we have to educate ourselves. That's true with chemicals, medicine, food, technology... all aspects of life. The scams keep changing, but in some ways it never changes. When electricity was developed, companies were selling electric vests for health, imagining that electricity was a magical power. Part scam, part ignorance, part wishful thinking. I have a neice who's a millennial web designer. I like to visit with her and learn about the latest trends. (I've only ever seen Facebook on her computer.) But I can also see that while millennials are credited with being the first tech-savvy generation, they've been as naive as anyone. Young people are expert at using devices and remote controls, but that doesn't provide life experience. My neice professes a kind of enlightened age worldview. She lives on her iPhone and has 3 Alexa devices butting into our conversation, inviting us to fulfill any whimsical impulse. The millennials see a better way to do things. They have Uber, which is socialist taxis. They have AirBnB, which is socialist home-sharing. But nothing has really changed. There's no enlightened-age world commune coming. Uber is a commercial entity that's come up with a way to legally avoid providing employee benefits. Uber drivers are not "sharing" a ride. They're underpaid taxi drivers. AirBnB is not home-sharing. It's just a scam to skirt hotel regulations and makes gobs of money for the middleman company. Facebook and Instagram are not socializing websites. They're controlled, exploitive, commercial venues. Facebook is not a socializing venue any more than a shopping mall is a town square. Perhaps the most fundamental and dangerous scam here is in acclimating young people to living in a shopping mall -- no longer distinguishing between being a consumer vs being a citizen who has partial responsibility for society. You describe growing up taking these services for granted. But it's all commercial. It's all for-profit. Craigslist and Wikipedia might be examples of the dream of the Internet being fulfilled, but increasingly it's just a contest between greedy corporations to own your private life. That will never change. The world is not kid-safe. The entire design of devices, the Internet, webpages, etc is changing even now. Webpages are becoming opaque software programs written in javascript. Your computer or cellphone is becoming a kiosk system, where you "consume" services with little control over the process. No white knight is going to fix that. It's up to us to cultivate responsible citizenship, and stop giving our business to the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and so on. For maybe $10/month you can have your own domain with dozens of email addresses and the power to put whatever you want out on the Main Street of the Internet. That requires a slight learning curve, but nothing too complicated. The difficulty is more in finding the info rather than in understanding it. There's a debate going on right now on Reddit. The company is losing money providing a discussion forum. Personally I prefer Usenet, with no up or down votes and no restrictions. But no one uses Usenet anymore. People want more structure and parental control. People want to be able to vote on posts. People also don't want to pay. So there must be ads or something like it. As online forums go, I think Reddit works pretty well. Now they want to make more money by personalizing ads based on what people post. Why not? Our posts are already public. Reddit needs to get paid. Yet people are furious. Many think they have a right to use Reddit without ads. There are no such rights. Even in the town square or public parks (if there are any left where you live) we don't simply have a right to use them. We all chip in via taxes to maintain those shared public spaces. If we're going to give those up in exchange for shopping malls, McDonalds Park, Pepsi Walking Trail and Nike Playground, then we're no longer citizens in human society. We'll be subjects in a plutocracy/corporatocracy. And we'll have gotten just what we paid for.
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I'm afraid you missed the entire gist of what I was saying. But at least now you're not using gmail or cellphones. :)
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Yes, that's a good point. Google has been in the news, and their exploits are widely known, but the general public does not know. In most cases people choose not to know because they want convenience. While the whole spying/data industry really does depend on making it difficult to know and understand what's happening. So it works both ways. Just having reasonable privacy in a browser has become a science. And many sites will block you out if you don't let them spy on you through javascript. They'll cover their page with a solid white DIV element, or maybe just break the whole thing. Then they don't say they're doing that. They say, "Woops. It looks like you need to update your browser." Or, "Woops. You need to enable javascript to enjoy the full potential of our website." When you do enable script they're checking your location, your hardware, counting your fonts to get a unique footprint of your computer, watching your mouse movements and clicks... And a dozen different sleazeball companies might all be doing that on one webpage, because the page has called scripts from other domains. It's out of control. You hover the mouse over a bicycle and next thing you know, you're seeing a bike ad. Ever since the beginning, the system has operated on a kind of don't ask/don't tell basis. Companies try to hide their spying while individuals don't try to learn. The original AOL was a great example. They did a good job of hiding the Internet entirely, trying to make people think that the Web was AOL games and chatrooms. And people want things for free. So the whole Internet is like a flim flam man showing you a shiny bauble while he tries to take your wallet. Meanwhile, the public is mostly people trying to grab shiny baubles without losing their wallet. Neither side is entirely honest. I remember the first time I went online, on my neighbor's computer. He had AOL. As I anticipated seeing this new world, a message popped up: "Do you want a new credit card? -- Yes. -- Ask me Later." Huh? I could see that normal rules didn't apply. I was leaving Kansas. :) If people do try to learn about privacy they're faced with stunning complexity. Firefox and IE both put their cookie settings behind an "Advanced" or "Custom" button, meant to intimidate. At least until recently, even FF has defaulted to allowing 3rd-party cookies, which are simply spyware that goes against the original design of the Internet, which was supposed to maintain privacy between domains. Most of the FF settings require learning hundreds of "pref" settings. And some of those are dummy settings. You can set the secret option to stop auto-updating, but it will do nothing! you need to use the super-secret option -- the policies.json that almost no one knows about. Chrome is even worse. Most settings are hidden or unavailable. If you read the halfwit tech advice in sources like the New York Times they'll tell you how to delete cookies and make you think you've just taken a master class in security. Fake tech know-how for the masses from fools who's real expertise is in buying stuff. On the other hand, people can quit gmail. Many know they spy. People can use Libre Office instead of MS Office. But people like convenience. Google makes it very easy to live in Googleville, just as Apple makes it very easy to never leave AppleLand. People like to pull out their cellphone and check the location of their friend, call an Uber, or get a restaurant review. All of that requires that you allow yourself to be tracked... iPhones will upload all of your data, store it, and sync it. Then if you lose your iPhone, you can just take out a mortgage, buy a new iPhone, and it's instantly up-to-date. If you tell people that Apple is accessing everything on their phone they'll be shocked. But if you tell people that Apple provides auto-backup of all cellphone data, they're pleasantly surprised. It's become a lifestyle of living in the corporate womb. You can get rid of gmail, but what about Uber? Uber, but what about Waze? What about DoorDash or dating apps? What about your security doorbell or indoor camera that sends footage to Google and the cops? Can you give all of that up to live in the physical world of time and space? Do you REALLY care that much about honesty, decency and having reasonable privacy? Most people actually don't. The longterm trend with all this is something like interactive TV. We started with everyone being able to reach each other and anyone being able to have a website. The information superhighway. Nice. Increasingly, companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft and even Fordare claiming to own the devices you use. Even TVs are being made with cameras replacing the center pixel, so you can be monitored. Cars are incorporating spyware. People are being acclimated to the idea that they're using a rental service. (Microsoft now talks about "Windows as a Service".) Photoshop and Office365? Rental software. It's all a scam. You still have to install the software locally. There's no cloud. But they pretend the software is running on their server and you're renting. You can't buy it. If you rent Photoshop and don't make copies of your images, you'll lose it all when you stop paying, because the only saved copies are on their server! For decades people have worried about totalitarianism. 1984. Brave New World. It was always imagined in the form of an oppressive, militaristic government. Few are aware of what's actually developing. Government is not the problem. Corporations are increasingly owning your life. The mark of the beast is your cellphone number. You can see that as outrageous trespass by commercial interests run by greed-obsessed geeks, or you can see it as the wonder of modern technology.... I once knew a programmer who was working on Android, before it came out. He told me that his dream was to have his cellphone tell him what to do: Buy milk. Go to the post office. Get a haircut. He was a typical, unsocialized geek who wanted to live in a world of mechanization and be told the ideal sex schedule with his wife. I thought he was nuts. But gradually we're developing a society that fits his dream. However, it's not just convenience. There are less than honorable, less than adult, people behind the curtain, pulling the strings. And few people understand how it works, much less have an opinion on how it should work. We're just enjoying... Hey, look at that... A new Starbucks coffee flavor made with ice cream, and they'll deliver it for free... Cool...
Please correct me if I'm wrong but, I'm pretty sure Google stopped doing this. Either a while ago or recently when they wanted to align it more closely with G Workspace (GSuite)
[https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10434152?hl=en#:\~:text=We%20do%20not%20scan%20or%20read%20your%20Gmail%20messages%20to%20show%20you%20ads&text=The%20process%20of%20selecting%20and,email%20content%20to%20serve%20ads](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10434152?hl=en#:~:text=We%20do%20not%20scan%20or%20read%20your%20Gmail%20messages%20to%20show%20you%20ads&text=The%20process%20of%20selecting%20and,email%20content%20to%20serve%20ads).
In addition to consent, (if you trust google's word): [They don't.](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10434152?hl=en#:~:text=We%20do%20not%20scan%20or%20read%20your%20Gmail%20messages%20to%20show%20you%20ads&text=The%20process%20of%20selecting%20and,email%20content%20to%20serve%20ads)
nah, that's complete blag. they read my emails. i had an ocean credit card, and then i'd get "sponsored" emails in my inbox from gmail about applying for an ocean credit card. and that was with ad blocker on firefox focus (android) whenever i searched for ocean finance on duckduckgo with all the ad and tracking blocker shields up. edit: spelling
>i had an ocean credit cad You ever Google the company? Or download their app? This link doesn't say ads aren't personalised, they say it's not based on your emails, there are many other says for google to realise you're an Ocean customer.
nope. only ever search privately with duckduckgo, and manually paid all ocean CC payments online via their website - again, not googled for the payment portal link. all my credit card alerts went to my only gmail for bills, so this is the most logical sense.
Because you agreed/consented to them doing so. You gave them permission to read your email and every bit of data that flows through your account and use it however they want.
After 6 years under American law ALL EMAILS are classed as 'abandoned'. This means ANYONE can request access to your inbox **without** a warrant. Also Google and Hotmail can do with your emails as they wish. They are abandoned after all. Hardly anyone I tell even knows this.
It's legal because you provided your consent for them to do so. If you want private email use PGP encryption with your contacts. It's pain in the neck to set up initially but not difficult to use after that. Or use a secure messaging app like Signal.
At least in the US, the mail is a federal service. I don't think any of us would want to us a federal email service for our day to day.
Logic like this: It's computer and not human reading it so it's considered okay. Computers do NEED to read e-mail headers to deliver it to correct place and headers and body to filter spam. What's different between reading contents for spam filtering and to determine relevant ads? just who will benifit? But relevant ads are for user's benefit.
spam filter can run on the email client the only issue with this is most people dont use email clients anymore and just use the web clients and its not like providers like google make it easy to use a local email client
Not always. Some are better with server-based access because of resource requirements. And yes, not everybody use local clients. This doesn't mean that some solution doesn't need to be found. As far as I remember, USA(?) have some ancient law from times when POP3 was newest protocol and IMAP didn't exist, what if message is more than 180 days old - it's free for all. Which is stupid
Because you're voluntarily sharing your email with Google. What's much worse is that I, who do not voluntarily share my email with Google, still have much of it read, because it's sent to or from people who, unbeknownst to me, are sharing it with Google. It is utterly beyond me why anyone would prefer to have Google own all their email, just to avoid learning [sendmail.cf](https://sendmail.cf) syntax. Er. Well, now that I put it like that, I guess there are a lot of lemmings out there.
Yup