I'm not being paranoid. I'm being realistic and even taking notes.I've got a gmail account, as well as most other things beginning in "g" that Google's come up with. But I've only recently started to notice how really well they know me.
Opening a mail about a concert - the right margin will fill up with advertisements on how to buy tickets for concerts, how to find concerts etc. I wrote about the coeliac disease in a mail - the margin showed me gluten-free recipes. I wrote about a card - the margin showed me where I could find e-cards. And so on and so forth...
I'm presuming it's a machine doing these things, not an actual person. (What a boring day they'd have, reading through my mails...) But still - what's a machine doing reading my mail? Is there no such thing as privacy? Or are we all such good friends (after all, you need an invitation to have a gmail address, don't you?) so we ought to share our mail content with the world?
2 comments:
Yes, it does that, it's a little freaky. I have a gmail account now too, but I'm not using it yet.
I wanted to see that film on Paris, I think it should be really good. No particular reason, just that I was born there ;)
Anything Google is just automatic indexing...which can lead to interesting errors in judgement in the ads as well. Not to mention the other issues, of security and privacy, for example...see http://www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com/ for more on this.
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