It would be more honest to say that "this is no longer true." For the majority of Gmail's existence, Gmail did use your actual email content for advertising.
And Google still processes the content of your emails, no? Are all of those smart features like identifying flight bookings done completely client-side (hint: they're not)?
> Although Google stopped scanning email content to tailor ads in 2017, last year the company started showing shopping ads in Gmail. And it still scans emails to facilitate so-called smart features such as the ability to add holiday bookings or deliveries straight to your calendar, or to autocomplete suggestions.
> Every way you interact with your Gmail account can be monitored, such as the dates and times you email at, who you are talking to, and topics you choose to email about, says Rowenna Fielding, founder of privacy consultancy Miss IG Geek.
Sorry, sure, yes - for ~5 years, this has been true. 2017 was before my time, and I have no idea what was happening then.
> And Google still processes the content of your emails, no? Are all of those smart features like identifying flight bookings done completely client-side
Of course, no, but the same is true of things like spam detection. What is the difference between scanning emails to see if they are spam and scanning emails to see if they are flight details? Or to scan emails to see if they have malware? In all these cases they’re not used for anything outside of Workspace, and they all provide some value to users.
> Every way you interact with your Gmail account can be monitored, such as the dates and times you email at, who you are talking to, and topics you choose to email about
Sure, yes, this could be monitored. This is the equivalent of saying, “when you use a saas product, the provider can see what you do”. It’s both obvious and uncontroversial- even the e2e encrypted messaging apps can see who you are communicating with and when.
The important consideration is that Google doesn’t use this for anything that is personally identifiable. You can choose to believe this or not, that’s up to you, but the same is true of literally every saas service everywhere.
There is a very big difference here. In your example, you've clearly entered into someone else's property; in the case of reading the info sent to your computer... I am reading a thing you sent me!
A more accurate version of your analogy is if I asked to hold a police officer's tazer and he handed me his gun by accident... or even if I asked to see his gun and he handed it to me thinking it was empty, but it was in fact loaded.
Point being, the website essentially put that information on my computer! I am asking for something from them, but what they give me is 100% their business! They don't have to obey my request but they do have to not-send-private-data-to-random-people-who-ask-for-it
I'm not a logseq user but have toyed around with it and am really hoping it gets to a rock-solid state soon. Development has been moving super fast but I'm not quiteeee ready to trust it with all my notes. I'll probably switch once they release a beta (as it's currently alpha software).
Google Meet is unusable on Firefox... about 1/3 of the time, 30-50min into a meeting, my whole computer starts to freeze up. Using Chrome fixes it. So now I have Chrome on my computer and use it exclusively for Google Meet (I have to use Google Meet for work).
This happens even with all my browser extensions turned off.
Meet video randomly stops working (typically excessive freezing) for me in FF, too. I also resort to using Chromium, since it is de-googled to a degree.
Youtube also takes ~30 seconds to fully load, too, versus <3 in Chromium.
I love QBserve! It's been really useful for me (if somewhat terrifying to see the amount of time I spend on social media haha). And it's the only product I've found that is both completely functional (a lot of OSS in this space is missing major functionality) and that I trust to not be sending my highly detailed, highly-personal data to... some random server.
Something this article doesn't mention is that FB's glasses, because they look extremely-similar to normal glasses, will face less opposition simply because many regular people won't realize that they're being surreptitiously recorded by a mega-corporation with a track record of serious privacy violations.
There's something even creepier about this. "Oh wow those video glasses that were clearly-identifiable as video glasses were met with violent opposition... well I guess let's disguise our version as regular glasses! Problem solved :)"
I agree, especially about the poor communications from leaders part... the overwhelming official message (as I have experienced it) has been "vaccines will save us". There was never any serious attempt to add ventilation to schools and public places, nor to set reasonable expectations about how much a vax can do when it isnt distributed to the whole world (aka there is still a ton of circulating virus & new variants forming all the time).
I have found this immensely frustrating. And now people who have been trusting those official sources are finding themselves surprised, confused, and, yes, scared.
