[dikaiosune]

While the technology is very cool, this pushes me that much closer to a "dumber" email service. It's always a conflict for me as I love shiny new things, but I'd rather we let AI loose on someone else's email, especially when the AI's revenue stream is advertising (a business predicated on knowing as much as possible about your audience).

[smtddr]

Just fyi, https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=html ...still works! I bet there are some people on HN who never saw the original Gmail.

[dikaiosune]

Very cool, and that definitely takes me back to eagerly pursuing/waiting out my beta invite. Unfortunately I would guess that even with a retro interface all of one's email data is still subject to content trawling, but that's a nifty discovery nonetheless.

[Houshalter]

Wow that look so much nicer than the real gmail. And it loads 10x faster too.

[bobmichael]

I don't think I understand your reasoning. You're already tolerating an AI processing your email to produce the ads, so assuming that, why does a cool new feature push you closer towards a "dumber" service?

[dikaiosune]

Because I'm lazy and switching would be time consuming. Each new privacy-related "innovation" motivates me a little more. You're right that the practical effect of this new service is negligible on a technical level, but it still reminds me that I should find an alternative I find acceptable.

[TeMPOraL]

So basically, because pretty much every useful data-and-automation-based thing - especially on the social, not individual level - can be considered an erosion of privacy, should we just stop progress? That's the sentiment I feel radiating from yours and others' complaints about privacy here.

[dikaiosune]

Certainly not. I quite enjoy the features I get from having my data run through a lot of systems. However, you don't need to be a Luddite to recognize that sometimes some users of data (like sometimes Google) aren't as responsible or considerate of the privacy implications of their actions as they should be.

When their primary financial incentive is user engagement to sell ads, I have a hard time believing that the latter doesn't influence the use of my data as much as the former.

I still use a variety of Google products all the time, but when they're training machines to understand the meaning of my emails, I begin to think perhaps that's beyond my comfort zone. I think that machine learning has tremendous things to offer society, but I'm not sure I'm super excited about a company using smartish machines to pull meaning and context from my emails so that we can save some percentage of users 10 seconds when they reply to something. I get that in most cases this isn't ever going to have a practical effect, but I would be a lot more comfortable if our society's data stewards were less blase about that side of things.

[TeMPOraL]

I see your point better now, thanks for clarifying.

> When their primary financial incentive is user engagement to sell ads, I have a hard time believing that the latter doesn't influence the use of my data as much as the former.

I don't agree with it in case of Google. I may be mistaken, but my impression was that they sort of separate their products into two groups - the ad-related are earning the money, and then the money is spent on funding something else (like GMail), with little direct connection between the two groups. That is, products like GMail certainly help Google earn more money on ads, but are not themselves optimized for ad-related purposes.

> I think that machine learning has tremendous things to offer society, but I'm not sure I'm super excited about a company using smartish machines to pull meaning and context from my emails so that we can save some percentage of users 10 seconds when they reply to something.

I think you're seriously underestimating the potential for productivity gains here. Mobile use case is perfect for replying to e-mails, but mobile experience totally sucks. This service, if it works as advertised, will be probably saving not 10 seconds, but something like one minute per e-mail. That + friction reduction have enabling properties that make people do things they didn't before (e.g. I often don't reply to e-mails on a phone only because it's too slow, opting to browse Facebook instead), and aggregated that can help liberate a lot of time.

[microtonal]

should we just stop progress?

I would love if companies would explore on-device processing more. While it might not work in this case, it should work fine for e.g. data extraction for flight tracking, hotel bookings, package tracking, etc.

[TeMPOraL]

Oh yes, so much this. The cloud business model thing leads to not just privacy-eroding solutions, but to implementations that are absolutely ridiculous from the engineering point of view, and exist only because the company thought it's a good way to extracting rent from the user. See, for instance, most of the work done around IoT, home automation and by hardware startups.

[jonknee]

More than just the ads (which you may not have if you're on a business account), you're also taking advantage of AI processing for the spam filter.

[quadrangle]

how do you know the poster isn't blocking the ads? (or for that matter using a separate client?) and anyway, ads are stupid awful crap, so who cares if they get that part right? It's nothing like actual email messages.

[anemic]

advertising becomes scary when this service tries to suggest responses like "Yes, let's have a meeting tomorrow and why not enjoy a refreshing glass of ice-cold Dr.Pepper together!". But if not, I'm not that worried about the ad revenue aspect.

[kobayashi]

Please drink a verification can.

[zitterbewegung]

You can make gmail "dumber" by using the IMAP api and then encrypt your email? Unless you use google apps for work since you aren't paying for the service you are the product.

[dikaiosune]

Using IMAP + encryption obviates all of the features that keep me on gmail, and would also be time consuming (especially with my non-technical contacts). On a practical level, I think your suggestion is equivalent to using a different email service -- high effort of implementation, loss of gmail's "smart" features, etc. Whether I'm using Google's servers or not, hiding my stuff from their systems amounts to the same effects on my life.

[sunnyps]

Stop with this "you're the product" nonsense. Please.

[ljk]

> * Stop with this "you're the product" nonsense. Please. *

what would you call it?

[cromwellian]

Google does not sell "users", that's why it is inaccurate and misleading.

What would you say of a private highway that sells billboards? If the business model of a private highway is not tolls, but instead selling ads along the road. "You're not the user, you're the product?" Would you say the highway owner is selling the personal information of the drivers?

The people buying billboards do not receive any personal identifying information about the drivers, they are instead buying access through an auction, like if this particular highway feeds into a sporting arena, then it is likely a good place to put ads for football fashion.

Within Google, Gmail/Inbox are Products. Their success metrics are user happiness and usage statistics. Like many startups, Google produces products which get marketshare and please users first, and then figure out the business model later. Google itself was launched with no real business model. And when Gmail was created, there was probably no plan on how to make money on it. They just wanted to do something awesome, and Gmail was born.

[JoshTriplett]

> What would you say of a private highway that sells billboards? If the business model of a private highway is not tolls, but instead selling ads along the road.

If it's funded primarily by the billboards and not by the drivers, then yes, the billboard purchasers are the real customers. And that could potentially lead to poor results, such as optimizing for billboard viewing time rather than safety and throughput.

[cromwellian]

Even if I accept your interpretation, it still doesn't justify the description "you're not the user, you're the product" In the case of the private highway example, even if the customers are the advertisers, the product being sold isn't the drivers, it's the billboard space.

Google's users are not its products. You might claim its users are not its customers (users != customers), but that does not imply the users ARE the products. Just like the New York Times readers are not the real business customers, the advertisers are, however no one has ever exclaimed "The New York Times Readers are the Products!"

The Product is the New York Times, because that is the thing _Being Produced_. It is the work product of the journalists.

Likewise, the work product of the engineers, SREs, PMs, managers, ops and support for Gmail is the Gmail Service. That is what is created out of the hours they put in. There is an ancillary product that leverages externalities produced those products (virtual real estate to auction off), but it is not people's data as the product being sold.

This meme is really tiresome because it doesn't get to the root of the matter, which is, are the incentives of those working on Google's products aligned with the incentives of the business operations which have to derive a return on those investments.

There are two ways to look at this depending on your level of cynicism:

1. Google is a smart company that looks at the long term and realizes value by the creation of positive externalities. That is, it works from the premise that if you make good products that please your users, you will retain and get more of them, and there will be opportunities to monetize that. That is, retaining users is paramount, ergo, user trust, branding, and generally not pissing off users is very important.

2. Google is a short sighted company that looks at what is currently has, lets bean counters manipulate its products purely to increase the bottom line by maximizing the amount of stuff they can sell. This means, they only consider the wishes of advertisers, and act to increase purely the amount of ads that can be shown, regardless of how much it annoys users.

Now, you can decide to believe #2 or #1 depending on how harshly you view the trajectory of Google products over the years. To be sure, they have done things that have annoyed users. But I believe, based on evidence of actually working here, that the primary impetus of engineers and product managers who guard the high level product features, that the focus is tipped towards user concerns.

[TeMPOraL]

Then it would be fair to complain if the company was a) new, or b) it was already a typical thing to do for them. Google keeps proving otherwise; applying "you're the product" meme to them is nonsense.

[msellout]

Perhaps so, if the company was short-sighted. A company thinking for a longer time-frame would likely weight customer happiness as a very important factor for long-term profits.

[sunnyps]

The product is the service being offered, in the case of Google it's search, mail, maps, etc. How they make money is unrelated to what the "product" is. E.g. I switched from free ad-supported YouTube to the paid ad-less YouTube Red, does that mean what the "product" is suddenly changed? Also you really are the "customer" or "user" of the many services being offered by Google just like an advertiser is a "customer" of the advertising side of Google. That doesn't imply one type of customer (the advertiser) is more important than another type of customer (the user).

[jerf]

This is a lot of words that amount to "Nuh-uh!"

The entire point of the "if you're not paying, you're the product" spiel is that everybody already knows everything you said, but there's a fundamental difference between paying and not paying. You're not going to get that far demanding that people stop thinking there's a difference, nor are people going to stop verbalizing that difference, nor should they. What's cliche on HN is something the vast majority of the rest of the world still has not heard, and in this case, ought to.

[moultano]

The reason this argument is so useless it that it is so non-specific. A useful form would be "This company is treating me poorly in way X because they have an incentive to do so." Instead, X is never specified, just implied via FUD.

Companies only interested in short-term profits might be willing to strip mine their users and treat them poorly. Companies that are interested in the long term have an incentive to treat their users well, i.e. as if they were paying customers.

[sunnyps]

That was a rational argument. You know as well as I do that if you explained it the way I did above most people would not care. But instead you insist on the "you're the product" FUD nonsense to elicit an emotional response. Spreading FUD is a demagogue's job, I would never condone it.

[dragonwriter]

A more accurate statement would be that you are the supplier of several key inputs (both data and ad viewership), that are used in creating the product that they sell to customers paying money, and that, as a supplier, you are paid with the products you consume (e.g., gmail, etc.)

Another (equivalent) accurate way is that you are, in fact, a paying customer for the product you are consuming, but a customer that pays in-kind with things that they use to create another product that they sell to people who pay with money.

[daveguy]

Stop making the user the product. Please.

[cballard]

I have somehow managed to avoid being sold by Facebook.

They have managed to sell the ability to include content in HTTP responses sent to my requests, though.

[Karunamon]

He's not wrong and you are. You are not "the product", and saying such is so divorced from the truth to be nothing more than a lie at this point. "You" are not being sold, access to you is.

Look at some ads, get some great web services. Seems a fair tradeoff.

[dikaiosune]

I'm not entirely sure this is a semantic argument worth wading into, but I think there's a wrinkle worth addressing in the "you're the product" mentality. In order for Google to effectively serve you ads (and convince advertisers it's worth their prices), they accumulate vast amounts of information about their users. From some perspective one's identity is largely based on or equivalent to one's purchases, tastes, interests, friendships, knowledge, etc. Advertisers (like Google) try to know as many of these as possible about everyone they can, and I can see how for many people this is equivalent to Google selling "you" -- they have a digital representation of your identity, and their ability to comprehend it is the real service that sits behind the advertising.

[Karunamon]

I disagree that this is an argument over semantics seeing as how "Google is selling access to your attention based on what they know about you" is much less scary sounding (and more accurate) than "Google is selling you/your information".

The latter makes it sound (willfully) as if random third parties have access to the information Google has collected, which is a pretty blatant falsehood. Anyone is able to go sign up for an Adwords account and see how "targeting" works. At no point does the advertiser get to see anything about the people.

The whole "Google is selling you/You're the product" meme is a breathless, thought terminating cliche that needs to die.

[claar]

Are you also willing to stop emailing others that use Gmail?

[dikaiosune]

Probably not. I don't have a very absolutist perspective on these privacy issues, but I do think that I should probably be taking my advertising business elsewhere (if anywhere at all), and that I should probably find a way to limit the amount of my data they gobble up. I'm lazy and I would prefer something that works to something which keeps all my information safe, which is why I'm still using gmail even though I'm creeped out.

[ocdtrekkie]

Arguably, the easiest way to contend with this would be to send Gmail users a private link with the text of your communication. Or encrypting the text.

[ljk]

any "dumber" email service suggestion?

[dikaiosune]

I've looked previously, and usually thought I would get some bare metal at a trusted colo and run my own server. However this has a variety of issues, including but not limited to getting the big email services (especially gmail, ironically) to trust your server as a non-spam gateway. Part of the problem here is that running a quality email service isn't cheap, and I'm not sure how much I'd have to trust a provider for it to be worth ditching google as my provider. In the past, the "easiest" answer to this in the abstract was for me to just do it myself, but I haven't had time and I'm concerned it would make it difficult for others to communicate with me.

[ocdtrekkie]

Running self-hosted mail is getting a lot harder because spam engines are much more hostile to it. Also, most well-known mail clients for self-hosters are very dated. There's a few new ones on the way, like Mailpile, but we aren't there yet.