undefined | Better HN

0 pointsDed7xSEoPKYNsDd11y ago0 comments

> And I don't see them snooping for their own purposes.

Well, Google does read your email to show you better ads. But they never made a secret of that.

> The NSA can get what they want anyways.

If they really want to, yes. That doesn't mean one shouldn't try to make it as hard as possible for them. They won't bother if their cost/benefit analysis says you aren't worth it to get out the big guns. (Reliable 0 days aren't cheap and using them too often soon makes them worthless.)

0 comments

the_hangman11y ago

> Well, Google does read your email to show you better ads. But they never made a secret of that.

I really wish this trope would die already. Google is not a person. Google does not read your emails. Employees at Google aren't sitting there reading your emails. An algorithm scans your emails for certain keywords, and displays ads based off of what it finds. That is not the same thing as reading your emails, and it's ridiculous that a forum like this would fall for such fear mongering.

millstone11y ago

> Employees at Google aren't sitting there reading your emails

Well, except when they do. http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...

> An algorithm scans your emails for certain keywords, and displays ads based off of what it finds

It's more than that. For example, they also scan images to identify child porn. Or Google Buzz, which showed that they scan and track the people you contact most often, and may do undesirable things with that information, like publish it.

It's naive to expect that Google/Facebook/whatever supplier of corporate IT stuff will just serve as a wholly passive platform, especially if the service is not paid.

Ded7xSEoPKYNsDdOP11y ago

I'd change that 'read' to 'scan' but I can't anymore. I really don't care about that particular phrasing. Not being a native speaker I don't think I'm even qualified to argue the semantics of the word 'read' and whether it can be applied to an algorithm or not.

I was trying to point out that some level of snooping by the cloud providers themselves is going on right now. Note that I tried to defend Google's behavior by saying that it is no secret and people are opting into it willfully.

Retra11y ago

I think the important point here is that you still have some anonymity in the sense that your data is processed in the same way as everybody else's. Saying "Google reads your emails" is basically a fear-inducing way of saying "Google scans everybody's emails."

Yes, they scan your emails. But not _particularly_.

spacemanmatt11y ago

Google also read your mail to store it on disk or send it over the network.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse