>
> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> > I'm waiting for the anti-Google backlash. They know
> > what you search, they know what's in your mail - yikes!
>
> Isn't this true of every search and e-mail provider?
No. I ignore ads on web pages (though I suppose they might have some dark subliminal effect) but the other day I got a reply on gmail from a client about staking a tower crane and in the margin of the the gmail page I see an advertisement concerning tower cranes. What? You haven't seen any banner ads on random web pages about tower cranes lately, have you? Now my ISP could in theory fill fat databases full of all my predilections in internet content, obviously the data pass through their routers, all they need is tcpdump, but I'd bet they don't. Until I saw the tower crane ad I wasn't aware how gmail was dissecting the text context of my email there.
In fact the Google company clearly does apply some kind of AI to the content of your emails, coming and going, openly, as a matter of course.
They're using awesome numbers of CPU cycles to pick apart and do word counts and correlations of phrases, and awesome amounts of disc space to store all this apparently random rubbish, in all the text of not just every web page they can robotically browse - that's their original search engine business - but also every last email you gmail. This mass of data is their payoff; you get this nice universally accesible email/archiving service for zero cash; you pay gmail by letting them fiddle about with your real-life text data.
Yours WDK - WKiernan at ij.net