YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Now Google says it might use your Gmail and Google Photos data to target ads

112 points JustSkyfall 2 hours ago 49 comments

krunck 2 hours ago | parent

I dumped Google years ago because I saw this, among other enshitification, was inevitable. Never looked back. Life is good.

noncoml 57 minutes ago | parent

What do you use for email?

heikkilevanto 56 minutes ago | parent

ProtonMail, FastMail, self-hosted...

Rebelgecko 36 minutes ago | parent

Why not standardize on a single solution instead of maintaining your own stack AND paying for someone else to do the work?

platevoltage 31 minutes ago | parent

If I could use ProtonMail with my mail client without a weird bridge application, I would have switched a long time ago.

mportela 56 minutes ago | parent

I'm using Proton. Never had an issue with them.

noncoml 51 minutes ago | parent

Do you emails land on the inbox when the recipient is on gmail? Or do they go to spam?

cowlevel 54 minutes ago | parent

Tuta

throwaway81523 49 minutes ago | parent

It's basically impossible to not use gmail. Even if you don't have a gmail account or address yourself, the person you're emailing probably has it, so your messages gets sent to a gmail server and gets scanned by them. What I want to know is whether Google uses the contents to profile YOU.

wahern 42 minutes ago | parent

GMail has a 25-30% share of the client market.

Is it impractical to never send a message through Google? Probably, depending on the circles you communicate in. But that's not the same thing as saying it's impractical to avoid Google for most of your messages, and certainly not the same as saying you can't avoid GMail for anything.

warkdarrior 38 minutes ago | parent

My main email is not GMail, but I forward it to a GMail account to get free spam filtering, free backup, and free search. I encourage everyone to do the same.

adiM 32 minutes ago | parent

How does that help in preventing Google from profiling you?

frizlab 27 minutes ago | parent

That’s, to put it plainly, dumb.

msm_ 14 minutes ago | parent

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If everyone reads "it's impossible to avoid gmail, just use gmail", then yeah, gmail prevails.

But it's plain false. YOU can decide against using gmail. I don't use gmail. I sometimes talk with people who use gmail, but more often than not, I don't. Stop being fatalistic.

bamboozled 44 minutes ago | parent

I just pay for it like any other service.

xigoi 32 minutes ago | parent

Purelymail. Really cheap, just works and doesn’t get in my way.

https://purelymail.com/

petepete 12 minutes ago | parent

I've been on Purelymail since last December and I can't recommend it enough. It does exactly what I want in the way I expect it to.

frizlab 26 minutes ago | parent

Fastmail. They are good.

black_knight 25 minutes ago | parent

Buy a domain, then you don’t lose your address if you ever decide to jump to a different provider. I use fastmail currently. But I also keep my own backups.

Muhammad523 52 minutes ago | parent

I also dumped google long time ago, i was around 12

cowlevel 54 minutes ago | parent

Google's always done this, it's the entire reason Gmail exists. Now they're just saying it.

ViktorRay 51 minutes ago | parent

This isn’t true and this level of cynicism is really unhelpful.

They originally used Gmail in that way. Many years later they stopped. This was a major victory for privacy. The fact they seem to be doing it now again is bad. Saying they’ve “always done this” is the kind of empty conspiratorial cynicism that dampens action and makes people feel it is futile to notice these changes or speak up about them.

slyrus 42 minutes ago | parent

The fact that they did it in the beginning and are doing it now makes the whole “well, there was a period of time when they didn’t do this” seem like a minor footnote to the notion that “they’ve always done this”. Even though the statement isn’t strictly true, it sure seems like the cynicism is warranted now and, with the benefit of hindsight, was back then too.

warkdarrior 40 minutes ago | parent

Giving up (aka cynicism) is easy.

ForHackernews 20 minutes ago | parent

On the contrary, it seems like giving up Google is hard for many people.

cowlevel 40 minutes ago | parent

What's the evidence they stopped?

Haranrk 4 minutes ago | parent

Information meta has on me - instagram reel viewing data

Information google has on me - my entire life

Yet meta ads are far more eerily relevant. This could imply two things -

a) Meta’s recommendation team is exponentially better (unlikely)

b) Google doesn’t use gmail and workspace data for ads

accrual 41 minutes ago | parent

"might" === "absolutely will", just for the record.

javcasas 37 minutes ago | parent

No. You mean "we are already using, but before you notice..."

varispeed 39 minutes ago | parent

Well, if we didn't have corrupt regulators, Google would have been fined out of existence ages ago.

That said it will be interesting way of exploitation. If you want to find people who have certain email content, you can serve them ads manipulating them into taking an action. Like buying a scam product / malware.

jsemrau 30 minutes ago | parent

The enshitification of Google is inevitable. It went from all the space you ever need for your email to "you are at 93% usage. Upgrade to premium" in just a few years.

mandeepj 26 minutes ago | parent

Gmail has already been targeted from day 1!

changoplatanero 17 minutes ago | parent

But then they stopped cause the marginal value of the information they got from gmail was not as large as it used to be. The information from email receipts from purchases was particularly valuable but major retailers stopped providing that in email to limit how much info google could observe.

sippingabonedry 23 minutes ago | parent

Friendly reminder when you click a link in a Gmail message, Google's servers also make a separate HTTP request for that link.

For your safety I'm sure.

adamtaylor_13 23 minutes ago | parent

You've gotta be able to actually show me ads before you can target me with ads.

gregglain 22 minutes ago | parent

"might"

zmmmmm 19 minutes ago | parent

Since the comments are going to be flooded with people reactively assuming it is straight up directly accessing them, here is the actual qualification:

> [they will not use for ads] ... unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads

So it is more reasonable than I think most people are assuming.

preommr 16 minutes ago | parent

something something boiling the frog

kmod 10 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

NoahZuniga 4 minutes ago | parent

The most charitable interpretation is that gemini might get your pictures as context by connecting google photos, then comment on the content of said pictures in its output, and then the output is used to personalize ads (like what chatgpt is doing rn). This indirectly uses google photos data to personalize ads so they have to add this rule to their privacy policy.

bluesnowmonkey 18 minutes ago | parent

Jokes on them, I don't see ads anymore. I even have ads stripped out of podcasts I listen to.

wuschel 15 minutes ago | parent

Curious - how, if I may ask?

xnx 4 minutes ago | parent

Can't speak for the parent, but they may be using: https://github.com/podly-pure-podcasts/podly_pure_podcasts . I couldn't figure out how to get that working on Windows so I rolled my own: podcast-dl + parakeet + Gemini.

amelius 17 minutes ago | parent

Advertising is the root of all evil.

Driver of overconsumption.

Keeping us hooked on social media feeds.

Targeting children, making them use addictive products.

Making everything more expensive (because we are paying for the ads eventually).

Collecting our data.

...

ErroneousBosh 15 minutes ago | parent

Awesome.

Most of my photos (hundreds and hundreds of them) from the past week are of shitty untidy black spaghetti network racks that are completely beyond all saving and frankly require the building to be flattened and everything rebuilt from scratch.

So if this can help a company find a way to advertise a clean and humane way of solving this problem that doesn't involve me tracking down and deep frying the network engineer that left this unholy mess, then quite frankly I'm all for it any my cash is waiting.

pessimizer 7 minutes ago | parent

Now Google says that it has no values, no respect, and no fear.

torben-friis 5 minutes ago | parent

Here's an idea: Targeted ads against workers of companies who buy digital ads. Drown them in content with influencers showing that digital ads have awful returns, and frankly, only people with small genitals decide to buy campaigns.