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.