Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
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"Still doing correctly"? They are very generous with their space allowance and you gotta wonder why. I haven't read the privacy policy, but I wouldn't be surprised if every email you receive, everything you buy, every account you own is feeding into advertising profiles about you as a user.
No, they do not read your email, they're very clear about this, that is mostly FUD pushed by privacy providers who lack ethical marketing standards.
The place where Google makes the money is on the sites you visit with Google Adsense and your search terms being associated with a logged in Google account. Most people want to stay logged into their email (and thus their Google account), so that's where the behavioral/adsense analytics comes in. Much fewer people use email clients these days.
"we do not process email content to serve ads" looks very specific. We don't process emails to serve you ads. It doesn't say they don't process ads to understand better what is relevent to you. It is also a very specific word, serve. Serving means displaying, but it doesn't necessarily mean profiling or targetting.
Ads are shown based on: "ads that were selected to be the most useful and relevant for you". So, they're saying they don't directly do that, but it doesn't cover indirect processing that would feed into this.
These people are very clever, and hire very clever lawyers that could easily demonstrate this in a court, so they could use that information and still meet the requirements of the policy.
Considering the astounding level of information gained from Android that feeds into their tech, it would be quite naive to believe they've ring fenced email as something they don't touch. Google still serve very relevant content to people that don't use search and don't stay logged into email. I cannot imagine it's a fluke. Email is a very expensive game to be in when you're insinuating that all they want is to be an identity provider to assist in tracking web interactions.
I always understood it as they don't parse the actual details of emails (the body) to generate an add profile. It doesn't mean they don't track what websites you're visiting whilst logged in though.
My guess to this is that it's not accurate, for example email chains, or someone mentioning something that you have no intention of buying. As the email body is very unstructured it would be quite difficult to interpret whether those keywords should be added as an interest, having said that, with advanced AI that can parse context of a sentence they may just start doing that again if they can with accuracy.