I used to work at Google. Its a big company, composed of almost 10^5 employees today. In my experience, they can be trusted to adhere to the letter of their agreements; no more and no less. That's not as bad as it might sound. Plenty of companies consider their contracts to be far more mutable than Google did while I was there.
But it does mean that you can't take any individual employee's word about what they are doing today. Individuals change. Managers change. People come and go. A fundamental part of the company mythos is that you as an individual know more about what goes on in the company than you really do. So unless you are acting in an official capacity to speak for the gmail and calendar teams, you should hush.
If the letter of their agreements permits GOOG to use your data for <X> purpose, then as a user of the service you should assume that they are.
Thank you for the citation. Nevertheless, I hope that you can clearly see the difference between referring folks to an official company communication, and starting off with "I work at google..." IIRC, there's mandatory annual training about just this sort of thing.
This linked post doesn't say anything about Google Calendar.
It's not necessarily that I doubt you, it's just that the press release is pretty specific that consumer GMail isn't going to be used for ad customization from now on, and it seems like if it was everything in G-Suite that would be mentioned somewhere.
I don't suppose there's a list Google maintains anywhere online that shows which of their own products they use to aid with ad targeting?
That's exactly what makes me nervous. Even someone working at Google isn't entirely sure what user data is or isn't sent to other parts of the company for other uses.
Plenty of other tech companies have lied, changed their policies, or just plain screwed up. Privacy and security are hard, and everybody has their hands out. As a consumer, there's no way for me to verify anything.
As Woz said (sort of), "Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window." When I make a backup to an external FW disk on my desk, or sync my phone with my computer over a USB cable, I know exactly what data is going where. The whole point of The Cloud being a cloud is that we don't know what's happening in it. It's inherent to the architecture. "Trust but verify" minus the "verify".
Has Google made any public statements about whether or not calendar data is used for ad targeting? Gmail was used for ad targeting until mid-2017[1] but I haven't seen anything about calendar.
Afaik, it was never used for ad targeting so there was no announcement to make. Just think about it for minute.
What percentage of people actively use Google Calendar? Out of those what percentage put useful information in there? How much commercial value does this information have?
But... why wouldn't they? Google already is heavily invested in doing this kind of parsing because a lot of their calendar entries are integrated with AI that figures out when you need to leave your house, how to add entries dictated over voice, how to auto-add new appointments based on emails without duplicating entries, and so on.
So Google already needs to know how to parse your calendar data in intelligent ways. And the way that data would be integrated into ads is not going to be all that different from the way Gmail data was processed.
Who cares if it's a small fraction of users? It's basically free data, being consumed by technologies that Google already has to build anyway -- and for the few users that do heavily use calendar, you're getting a ton of data on their everyday schedule.
Why build a set of tools that can do all of this parsing and then say, "nah, we're not going to deploy it everywhere."?
> What percentage of people actively use Google Calendar?
I don't know. My hunch is that it's not a fringe product though.
It's been a while since I checked, but I remember either Calendar or Keep being the default calendar app on Android. What percentage of Android owners use the built-in calendar on their phone to set reminders?
I generally expect Google to be using all possible data sources they have access to for ad targeting without explicit statements otherwise like Gmail has received.
You work for Google and are apparently "pretty sure" that Calendar isn't used for ad targeting but don't actually know, how is a consumer supposed to know this stuff?
You have access to their appointment graph from all the calendar invitations sent, especially with attendees list. You have access to meetings I am invited to even though I don't have a google account since my email address appears in invitations.
It's part of the google eco system. It's integrated with android, google assistant, gmail, ... Chromebooks need web-only replacements for Outlook and Office.
It's also a freemium product, because you can pay for gSuite.
Get people to stay logged in to Google. Then when you do your regular google.com searches, Google knows exactly who you are rather than trying to figure it out for an "anonymous" searcher. I'd guess that alone is worth the cost of operating Gmail for free for everyone.
Companies pay €€€ to use it for business. Free version was good introduction.
One reason for using Gmail (which is generating ad money) is the integration with calendar. Getting travel bookings automatically in calendar is useful.
About 2yrs ago I booked a flight to my relatives for a Christmas trip and pasted the info into my Google calendar. Within hours, I got google calendar notices about not having confirmed my hotel reservation. It was VERY annoying as it was borderline deceptive, presented as if I'd already gone through the whole reservation process but failed to confirm.
It was definitely a Google notice, and a Google confirmation process when I clicked through to confirm if I wanted this service. I shut it off as best I could find and told them I wanted no part of any such deceptive marketing, even though I would perhaps have wanted a service that made it clear that I was being offered an option, not a fake reminder.
I saw nothing of it since, but then I'd shut it off, so I should have no data. So, it seems that Google has siloed projects that not all employees know about...
Seriously, multiple downvotes for an accurate recounting of an observed event contradicting a parent assertion, yet no one provides any new info? I don't expect any upvotes, but what am I missing here? Is there something against posting actual data and events?
What you're describing isn't an advertisement, so isn't at all relevant to the discussion.
It's well known (and not at all secret) that google will grab upcoming flight info from emails and put it into your calendar. But this info still isn't used for ad targeting.
However, I was describing the deceptive advertisement that came along with the flight->calendar populating feature (which is fine).
The advertisement that Google added to my calendar was an auto-populated fake hotel reservation.
It was setup to look as if I'd previously reserved rooms but had simply failed to confirm the final ccard info -- the click-thru literally went straight to the enter ccard info page with my "reservation" prepopulated.
This was trying to hijack any other reservation that I might have intended to make (of course it was really obvious to me since we were staying w/relatives).
Let's be clear:
Adding a "need a hotel?" link to my calendar might be ok.
Populating my calendar with an item for a business I've never even contacted is an advertisement.
Falsely claiming I've already made a reservation when I've never even contacted the business is a lie. It is a deceptive practice.
I was genuinely surprised to see this level of both advertising and deception from Google.
What you're describing is a bug. It may be due to something you did and didn't realize, it may be due to something the site you were reserving things on did and didn't realize, it may be due to a bug in how Calendar parses reservation emails. But its a bug somewhere along the process. It's not an intentional advertisement.
So you're being downvoted for claiming to have been the target of an unrealistic sounding advertisement campaign that, it seems, no one else has ever been targeted by. This, at Google scale, is pretty unlikely.
To give a recent similar example from HN, a user was complaining that google was incorrectly tracking their watch history on YouTube. In reality, they had been infected with malware that watched YouTube videos in the background. Your story gives me the same vibe, and that's likely why people are downvoting.
I had never made a reservation, never even searched for a hotel, as we were staying with relatives. So, there is zero chance that it had anything to do with other searches or reservation attempts, and the flights were made directly at the airline site (i.e., not through Google Flights or a travel aggregator).
The advert populated in the same time-frame as the flight; the airline's flight confirmation email to my Gmail acct had clearly been was parsed, and there was nothing in the email having to do with a hotel.
Moreover, when I clicked thru and found the menus, Google settings pages were there, offering to enable/disable the feature, along with describing that the "helpful" auxiliary reservation feature could not be turned off separately, and providing a feedback opportunity.
My recollection is that this advertisement itself also came with a google message about how this was a helpful new feature to complete my travel palns.
Obviously I turned it off, and slammed them in the feedback, in particular how I couldn't manage the sub-features (actual vs advertised reservations) separately.
Neither item ever happened again, which I would expect having turned off the feature. Which also indicates that this was something under Google's control as opposed to an infection or bug.
My guess is that this is a short-lived experiment, gathered a lot of the kind of feedback I gave, and was cut off by one of their smarter managers.
1) This occurred in exactly the same set of minutes since the email direct from the airline arrived and Google parsed it and posted the flight info to my calendar
2) The hotel locations and dates for the fake reservation were exactly matched to the airline travel dates.
It is also possible to win the lottery, but to post such an exactly targeted advertisement is for all practical purposes impossible without access to the email. Only three parties had access to it: The airline, me, and Google.
But it does mean that you can't take any individual employee's word about what they are doing today. Individuals change. Managers change. People come and go. A fundamental part of the company mythos is that you as an individual know more about what goes on in the company than you really do. So unless you are acting in an official capacity to speak for the gmail and calendar teams, you should hush.
If the letter of their agreements permits GOOG to use your data for <X> purpose, then as a user of the service you should assume that they are.