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0 pointspeatmoss7y ago0 comments

To add a third, I have a problem with my personal emails being used as a corpus of text to train these models.

Maybe they're using only my emails to train a model for me, and turning that feature off disables them doing so. Maybe they're using everyone's email to train a generic model.

Of course, they've been (machine) reading your emails to provide ads since forever, so in that sense maybe this isn't really that new. That said, many people habituated to email reading for ads back when Google's brand image was riding higher.

0 comments

prlambert7y ago

We're training Smart Compose from highly anonymized global corpus of consumer email.

We've stopped using emails for Ad targeting entirely, and the enforcement is quite strict, as reported in June: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html

peatmossOP7y ago

> highly anonymized global corpus of consumer email.

I read this as confirmation that, if I were a Gmail customer, that you would indeed be using my personal emails to train your models.

For me, I then have to wonder what "highly anonymized" means in this context. Does this means that users' emails are put through yet another processing pipeline to separate emails into anonymous / not-anonymous buckets or to redact personally identifying information?

gone357y ago

[H]ighly anonymized global corpus of consumer email.

What do you mean by "highly anonymized"? What specific privacy notion are you using, and what is the (demonstrably unavoidable) tradeoff you are de facto threading between utility and privacy?

jedberg7y ago

You don't have an email in your profile, so I'm just gonna hijack this comment. :)

I can't enable smart compose. My general tab doesn't have "Enable experiments" at the bottom. Is this getting rolled out in phases?

I logged out and logged back in just in case, but no dice.

My email is in my profile if you need it. Thanks!

prlambert7y ago

Rolling out over the course of the day. We'll be at 100% in a couple hours. Thanks for your patience. :)

1 more reply

dmazin7y ago

Yup, I forgot where I read this, but I believe all Gmails are eligible for the model. Again, forgot where I saw this, but Google takes great precaution to protect your data from human inspection, but being used in the corpus is fair game.

peatmossOP7y ago

I think if you are a (paid?) enterprise user, they do not do this.

On the other hand, sussing out what is and is not fair game is quite a lot easier with a service such as Fastmail.

scrollaway7y ago

Doesn't have to be "enterprise". Anyone can pay $5/mo for GSuite (https://gsuite.google.com), which includes gmail and a ton of other tools. Furthermore, it's on your own domain rather than @gmail.com, which is not only better (you truly own the email address), it's also a hell of a lot more professional and makes it easier to migrate to other services if you wish to.

To put it bluntly, if anyone here is complaining and has an @gmail.com address, email me and I'll be happy to help you buy your own domain and create MX records to either gsuite or fastmail. But I just can't hear the empty negativity anymore from consumers who say "no! bad google!", yet, by using the free product, keep making their emails available for the AI models and keep signaling to Google that an advertising business model works better than a paid-per-user one.

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njarboe7y ago

I don't think this is true. When our large university switched to gmail, all I could find was that they said they would not use our emails for targeting advertising. Seems like that leaves a lot of other possibilities like profile creation (they just won't use it to target ad at you), machine learning of all types, cross correlation with my personal email for who knows what, etc.

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prlambert7y ago

Paid domains can choose if they want us to use their data for training. Many do since it improves the quality of features they receive.

prlambert7y ago

This is correct.

ForHackernews7y ago

Don't use Gmail if you don't want Google reading your mail?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

prlambert7y ago

We're training Smart Compose from highly anonymized global corpus of consumer email.

We've stopped using emails for Ad targeting entirely, and the enforcement is quite strict, as reported in June: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html

peatmossOP7y ago

> highly anonymized global corpus of consumer email.

I read this as confirmation that, if I were a Gmail customer, that you would indeed be using my personal emails to train your models.

gone357y ago

[H]ighly anonymized global corpus of consumer email.

What do you mean by "highly anonymized"? What specific privacy notion are you using, and what is the (demonstrably unavoidable) tradeoff you are de facto threading between utility and privacy?

jedberg7y ago

You don't have an email in your profile, so I'm just gonna hijack this comment. :)

I can't enable smart compose. My general tab doesn't have "Enable experiments" at the bottom. Is this getting rolled out in phases?

I logged out and logged back in just in case, but no dice.

My email is in my profile if you need it. Thanks!

prlambert7y ago

Rolling out over the course of the day. We'll be at 100% in a couple hours. Thanks for your patience. :)

1 more reply

dmazin7y ago

peatmossOP7y ago

I think if you are a (paid?) enterprise user, they do not do this.

On the other hand, sussing out what is and is not fair game is quite a lot easier with a service such as Fastmail.

scrollaway7y ago

3 more replies

njarboe7y ago

1 more reply

prlambert7y ago

Paid domains can choose if they want us to use their data for training. Many do since it improves the quality of features they receive.

prlambert7y ago

This is correct.

ForHackernews7y ago

Don't use Gmail if you don't want Google reading your mail?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse