I'm guessing the multiple people telling you they think the feature is useful won't change your mind about "nobody could possibly want this", though.

You say it as if it's a revelation or discovery, when Google is very upfront about surfacing relevant information and reminders based on your inbox.

On more than one occasion, this feature has helped me take actions on pending work items like payments, renewals and so on.

You don't want Google to show you ads, fair enough. You don't want Google to surface for you (and only you) useful information that helps you organize your life.

It almost sounds like you just want Google to give you hundreds of dollars of compute, storage and service out of the goodness of their hearts.

I think both you and Google would be better off without each other.

It also sounds like you need to organise your life a bit better. Google's notorious for their screw-ups and service closures, one day you might miss an important payment because they turned off the feature or you end up on the wrong side of an A/B test.

It'd be surprising if there wasn't a clear or direct causal path about how Google found that information. For example, imagine that you paid for a hotel room somewhere in Thailand by cash, didn't carry your phone with you at the time, didn't log in to any electronic device, and still Google inferred that you stayed there, THAT would be surprising.

On the other hand, literally parsing out an email (AND even linking to it, you can click on the notifs to take you to the relevant email!!!) and showing you the result doesn't in any sense qualify as surprising.

No, but I do think that everyone who gets a service for free should by default assume they don't have much privacy. That is not a huge burden to assume.

I've used a paid email provider since before Gmail existed. They've not been blocked.

I know there are the occasional posts on HN about Gmail blocking their servers, but I doubt it's anywhere close to the norm.

The digital equivalent of the envelope is encryption - the carrier is allowed to see the outside but not the inside. The function of encryption is lack of comprehension - the carrier still knows the exact encrypted bytes of your mail, but cannot comprehend it. We generally accept that this is already a useful proxy for privacy.

Imagine a mail protocol that somehow lets you encrypt everything but the part necessary for spam identification. The carrier is able to apply some algorithm to determine whether it's spam, but no other information. I'll assume everyone thinks this sounds good (though impossible). Because encryption is just lack of comprehension, an algorithm that is only capable of parsing an "is spam" feature from email has the same level of privacy as this hypothetical. But an algorithm that is capable of parsing "your credit card payment is overdue" is able to comprehend something else, which is a different level of privacy.

(Of course, encryption is better than "They're not running anything that can parse this," because it says "Nobody can parse this.")

The answer here is privacy laws and auditability.

That they use millions of computing-dollars to extract this information and store it.

Supposedly spam detection does not need to understand the numbers in your bank emails. Supposedly it needs mostly information about you previous contacts and spammy patterns from the rest of the internet.

The point being that you cannot misuse the information you do not have. Google is very good at thinking of a lot of this kind of quality of life functionality, they do not seem to realize how creepy and disconcerting they can be.

> Either way it’s just a cpu pushing around ones and zeroes.

What is even this supposed to mean? also the information "kill on sight" on your profile of a terrorist association is just one bit, do not worry about that. The fact that they are digital does not mean that the data won't affect your life nor that human or machine will take complex decision based on them.

My point is that they already have the information, so any potential misuse or abuse is possible regardless of what types of parsing they're doing. It might just be inconvenient.

There is also a security issue, I trust google to keep my email secure, I trust less google to keep my profile metadata secure as selling it is its main business model.

My issue is that federal law regulates what information my bank can share with 3rd parties and allows me to opt out. The ethical thing to do is at least hold oneself to a similar standard. If I had worked on those projects I would have made it policy to ignore emails from healthcare providers and financial institutions outright, since there is far more harm that can be done than good.

I have no problem with data collection when it's done responsibly. But I get the feeling that most developers/engineers working on these features have warped senses of ethics and don't consider the large scale implication of what they're doing, or if they do they just ignore it. Either way, it's the blatant disregard for privacy that bothers me.

Nonsense. It's a totally reasonable ethical viewpoint to assume that a user who opts in to their financial institution to send their data to Gmail has opted into Gmail reading that email and trying to provide awesome features on top of it. It's not like Google keeps it a secret when it does this kind of stuff. This is the bread and butter what Google is, and anyone not interested in that kind of thing should choose another email alternative.

Google taking privacy seriously means they treat the data you share with them with respect. In this situation it is you, as a person who does not trust Google, who is apparently not taking privacy seriously when you opt into sending them your financial records.

Do you think customers have absolutely no responsibility over what applications and services they choose to use?

I realize the downvotes will come... But also take the time to let me know what I'm getting wrong.

Financial information in particular can be used against you by a number of parties, and it's been used to discriminate against people in the past. When it comes to the collection of that data by scanning private communications, the ethical alarm bells should have been ringing, and the fact they collect that data should be disclosed and be opt-in (or opt-out).

If it's a matter of "if you don't pay for the product you are the product" that's not true - I did pay a lot of money for their product (I own a Pixel device), and if they offered an email product that I could pay for with the solace that it wouldn't be reading my emails, I would.

And yet

> just the fact that engineers at Google thought users would appreciate having their private financial information parsed and stored by Google services is absurd.

> It should never have crossed anyone's mind to even do that, let alone advertise it as a feature.

That was an awfully quick turnaround from "I can't believe anyone would ever think this would be useful" to "I don't think it's unpopular".

Almost like your initial position was absurd on its face, so once challenged you had to immediately back up to a softer, more defensible one.

That's why I started by saying the disregard for privacy troubles me, and provided an example of a feature that was created out of that disregard, in my opinion.

Maybe I shouldn't have said it's absurd that they would find people liking the feature, but that it's absurd they consider it ethical to scrape private financial information and then present it as a nifty notification, and even more absurd that users don't see an issue with it.

> even more absurd that users don't see an issue with it

I don't see it as absurd, for the same reasons I've elaborated on elsewhere in the thread: the benefits are concrete and current, while the harms are nebulous/potential/abstract.

How was it presented to you in a way that you found deeply unethical? As I understand it shows up as a soft notification on your phone.

Years ago, I looked at my Google dashboard. They knew when i filed for taxes, how much was owed/reimbursed, my medical history. NONE of which I consented to Google using.

Google is constantly eroding the expectation of privacy we have wrt to our emails (and probably other things that are expected to stay private, if you are on android), and this bothers me on a fundamental level. And additionally, we have constructed a world for ourselves such that not using these services to not expose private information is practically not an option anymore.

I am a mixture of shocked and saddened that the HN crowd (at least so far, hudging from the comments) thinks it is a-OK for this to happen.

And that is where you are wrong. You DID consent to this use of the information in your email when you signed up with Google as your email provider. They don't exactly make any secret of the fact that the emails in your account will be data-mined, both for the various assistant features they offer and for their own business purposes, including marketing.

It is not Google's fault that you failed to consider the obvious implications of that consent.

> And additionally, we have constructed a world for ourselves such that not using these services to not expose private information is practically not an option anymore.

You have plenty of options. There are email providers other than Google, and means of communication other than email. Encryption is also widely available for those motivated enough to use it.

No, I (not the original poster) didn't. I signed up with a Gmail account years before any of this existed, and I never would have guessed they would do what the original poster is concerned about. At no point was I informed that this type of stuff would start happening. I figured it out by reading a lot of tech news that the average person does not. As such, I've moved away from Gmail, but there are probably millions of people who aren't OK with it, but don't know it's happening.

Whether or not you realized how the information could be used, you did consent for Google to have that information by choosing them as your email provider. Anyone with a modicum of understanding of how email works would realize that the content of any unencrypted email is readily available to the entity which receives and stores the email, along with the sender's email provider and the operators of any services it might pass through prior to final delivery. If anything this is even more obvious with webmail services. The only reason people are upset at Google here is that Google is more up-front than the average free email provider about the extent of the information they have and how it can be used. They didn't have to reveal what they know or provide controls over it or use it to offer services for their users' benefit. Sure, they also use it for advertising—but that was always part of the deal, since long before any of these other features existed. Yet it's these aspects that benefit the user that people seem to complain about the most, because it highlights aspects of the relationship they wouldn't otherwise have bothered to consider.

And look where we are now. Not only is it expected (!!) but people are telling us to suck it up, this is how it’s always been (it wasn’t) and it’s our own fault because we didn’t read the ToS. When did this become the norm, and when did it even become acceptable??

One more point I’m concerned about is that Google is changing the standard of what is acceptable for an email provider, to read your emails and use them how they see fit. This is something people casually gloss over. Would you be equally as upset if UPS or FedEx looked inside your packages and then bombard you with adverts, or sell the data to someone else?

Those packages are sealed. Emails are not, unless the content is encrypted, in which case Google wouldn't have access either. UPS and FedEx are welcome to what information they can glean from the outside of the package. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that packages are routinely X-rayed or subjected to other non-invasive scans, either. Certainly packages crossing an international border are frequently opened and searched by Customs, whatever the carrier and sender might prefer.

More to the point, when you send a package with UPS or FedEx that is a paid service carried out under the terms of a pre-agreed contract. The conditions under which a package may be opened, and how any information about the package may be used, are dictated by that contract. Email is a much less formal system relying on anonymous intermediaries; neither the sender nor the recipient is paying for secure end-to-end delivery. Frankly, there is no reason to assume any email is truly private. You have no idea how many distinct parties may have access to it before it's delivered to its final destination. That's true even if you run your own mail server, let alone relying on a free service offered by an advertising company.

One last thing. Do you really think Google is setting precedent here, "changing the standard of what is acceptable"? Businesses offering free email services to the public have always data-mined users' emails for advertising purposes. Google is just more up-front about it, and more inclined to use at least some of that data-mining to provide add-on services of actual value to most users.

Counterpoint: I find this feature super useful. (and I know a lot of other people who do as well).

Or "you have been served with a summons to appear at... See transportation options" (beta soon?). When a company has so completely lost sight of what its customers see as creepy that it advertises creepiness as a feature, it has lost its way.