I was hoping to achieve a "yes" or "no", to at least one of the two questions. I don't know what GP thinks "scan" means when describing how a computer processes text, and was hoping that an analogy to a more natural concept would allow for that to be made clear. What's the actual action being taken that's the violation? It's clearly not simply being able to read the message, but is it "thinking" about it (for lack of a better word)? That's how I interpreted the initial comment, but it seems very reactionary, so I wanted to make sure I understood it.
> People want to be able to have a private email correspondence about, for instance, dildos, and then not have to be served dildo ads outside of that context.
Totally fair, but that's no longer about privacy (unless your concern is someone else watching your monitor over your shoulder, in which case that person is the one breaking your privacy).
I would entertain the idea that friend A is being a bit of a douchebag by painting stuff all over your house without you asking them to, but if you subscribe to that thought process you'd already be running an ad-blocker and this scenario wouldn't ever occur in the first place.
So to be 100% clear on this: if you tell someone information, and they think about that information, that's a violation of your privacy?
I've definitely always assumed that the right to think about information is intrinsically coupled with the right to know about that information. I wouldn't give someone data that I didn't want them to think about.
> for possible future use and abuse
This is a completely reasonable concern to hold, but surely "they could possibly do something bad later" applies to every email provider in existence.
If your phone began analyzing your local photos for child porn, you'd probably be upset, no?
>This is a completely reasonable concern to hold, but surely "they could possibly do something bad later" applies to every email provider in existence.
True, but google is CURRENTLY abusing it by selling ads to me based on it.
Yep. "local" here is the key word, though. If a service I uploaded photos to began doing that, I would not be upset. And indeed, just about every image-hosting website in existence already does this, because they're legally required to.
Gmail is markedly not a local service.
> True, but google is CURRENTLY abusing it by selling ads to me based on it.
This makes it seem like your concern is with the advertisement funding model, not with privacy.
Imagine you have a message written on a piece of paper. You intentionally show this message to two people, Alice and Bob, and are fully aware that they have both read and can perfectly remember the entire contents of the message.
Now imagine that Alice thought about the message independently (not recalling it, but actually thinking new thoughts), and that Bob did not do this.
Are you claiming that Alice violated your privacy by thinking about something you showed her and asked her to remember? Or perhaps would it only be a violation of privacy if she then subsequently told you one of those thoughts?