[mali9]

One small difference is that the activity on GMail or large email providers is generally two-way and it becomes clear when you understand that clicking "Send" sends your mail away to be stored in GMail forever unlike where photos somebody would be taking with their friends are not aware if it is put in Facebook or similar social places.

[jacquesm]

That isn't true. Many domains are routed through Gmail where you have absolutely no way of knowing up front that you are going to be sending that mail through Google. It looks like any other email address on a private server.

https://gsuite.google.com/signup/basic/welcome

[martey]

G Suite has different privacy practices than GMail.

https://support.google.com/googlecloud/answer/6056650

> Does Google use my organization’s data in G Suite services or Cloud Platform for advertising purposes?

> No. There are no ads in G Suite Services or Google Cloud Platform, and we have no plans to change this in the future. We do not scan for advertising purposes in Gmail or other G Suite services. Google does not collect or use data in G Suite services for advertising purposes.

[jacquesm]

> We do not scan for advertising purposes in Gmail or other G Suite services. Google does not collect or use data in G Suite services for advertising purposes.

You could drive several trucks sideways through the holes in that statement.

[Applejinx]

On the other hand, training neural networks and teaching computers to have general intelligence is not inherently an advertising purpose ;)

[ReverseCold]

> for advertising purposes

What other purposes would they use it for? Can anyone think of one?

[ucaetano]

Malware. Child porn. They actually do both:

https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/5/5970141/how-google-scans-y...

Oh, and for indexing, of course.

[pbhjpbhj]

How about generating a "lifestyle profile" (or psych profile).

They could sell that to a third party, then buy back the profile compounded with other third parties's data to use for advertising. Bonus points if Alphabet (aka Google) control all the companies involved.

?

[curun1r]

No, it doesn't. It has an MX record that will clue you into it being hosted by Google. It may be inconvenient, but "absolutely no way" is hyperbole.

[jacquesm]

Right, what's the last time you checked the recipients domain MX record before sending an email?

That's just nonsense, nobody does this, people just send mail through some client and never ever check MX records by hand unless they are trying to debug some kind of problem, in fact, the vast majority of people have no clue that something like an MX record even exists. To them email is roughly equivalent to magic.

[curun1r]

Perhaps its just the ex-sysadmin in me, but I've done it pretty frequently over the years. Pop open a terminal, host -t mx example.com, done. Mostly I do this when I think there's any chance that my email will get routed to a server in China (pipe the result of the host query through nslookup and eventually to a whois against ARIN to see whether the IP is allocated by APNIC), since I'd prefer to avoid that.

I get that it's not common or simple, but "absolutely no way" doesn't mean absolutely no way that's common and simple. It's doable and, if you want to avoid it, there's plenty of ways to ensure that you never send directly to a Google server.

[jacquesm]

> Perhaps its just the ex-sysadmin in me

That's your problem right there. The general population has no way of knowing this, you do, but that's only because of your professional background.

So, for lay people there is absolutely no way and that's the vast majority of them, for us internet techies there are ways but they are moderately involved and too impractical for everyday use. And even then, you've established that you will send your email through google, what are you going to do now? Ah yes, send it anyway.

[e12e]

  [e-mail]$ cat "./forward"
  [e-mail]

How will you know that [e-mail] ends up at Gmail?

[eveningcoffee]

The question is that how many actual people realize it.