I believe this has actually been in the works for many, many years, but now they are publicly promoting this capability. You can read How Gmail Ads work
Personally, I consider this unethical because emails between you and your family, friends, clients and others should be PRIVATE – not data-mined so ads can be targeted at you.
Some people have been embarrassed by inappropriate intimate ads appearing in their email. Others have found creative ways to Massacre Gmail Ads.
I have a better way. I don’t use gmail.
Oh, I HAVE gmail accounts. You can’t work online and avoid them easily. (I even told Buzz NO but it appeared anyway.) I just don’t use them. But since many of the people I email to do the emails I send them are data mined.
In a recent post Big Brother Yahoo and Google Too I shared this information from a user of Yahoo email who experienced another type of email data mining.
I was in a dialogue with a distant relative via email. This relative had not seen or heard from me in 20 years. I temporarily forgot where I was during our email exchange [which was on Yahoo.com email ] and told her my age.
Within 48 hours my age appeared in my Youtube.com channel, without my consent, without my permission and without me even knowing it until I logged and found it posted. I quickly deduced where this information had been datamined from. Someone from Yahoo.com had provided it to Google, which owns Youtube and it appeared in my Youtube account so quickly I was stunned. And furious too.
Do you suppose most people have an expectation of privacy that what they send directly to a close friend or family or client is PRIVATE? How many know that what they type into an email can end up on unrelated sites online?
I don’t know about you but I find ads following me from blog to blog CREEPY! No way will that work on me. (Maybe it will work on people who don’t wonder why they see the same ad everywhere they go online.
What do YOU think?
One final thought. It is likely that all of our email, chat, blog posts, and social networking activities are being recorded. As one of many of my older posts about data mining and privacy quotes:
shouldn’t emails be private?! i don’t think this is ok at all, this kind of means that google stocks all the emails u send and saves all your private data, which is unbelievable!
hate when google does stuff like that!
~alex
Twitter: GrowMap
says:
Hi Alex,
If you think this is bad read about how Google’s new privacy policy will make this all far worse.
My comment in that post:
Few realize the implications of what Google just announced now – but they will. If you have private data and business data and data related to your job and data related to your health concerns in separate Google services they will now all be merged together.
When Sun Microsystems CEO said consumer privacy issues are a “red herring…You have zero privacy anyway…get over it.” this is what he meant.
Most people don’t know that potential employers, major landlords, insurance companies, and law enforcement have had access to their credit and health histories for a long time. Given the enormous number of people who can access even your personal medical history ANYTHING in it could go public at any time.
What is different is that soon ANYONE will be able to access ANYTHING about you – and it is the authorities who can take away your freedom that you should be most concerned about – not being embarrassed because some gossip is spreading photos or lies about you.
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In my opinion being a human marketers should not use anybody’s private emails and i also know that nothing is safe on internet. As a person they have no right to disturb others for targeting ads. Nevertheless you want to do then see that, are they your customers? then target your ad to them.
this is definitely unethical.. and it’s kind of alarming too… aren’t e-mails supposed to be private?! i hate it want google does stuff like that..
this is kind of reminding me of that google toilet commercial…
“Within 48 hours my age appeared in my Youtube.com channel, without my consent” Now that is crazy! outrageous! How dare they look into private matters like this.
When I signed up for Gmail or Ymail did I agree to something like that?
This kind of stuff scares me.
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Hotmail does the same thing to an extent I believe, I’ve seen this out there for a while though. Never been a big user of gmail, but for different reasons.
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Kind Regards,
I still believe in the right of privacy…
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I would never say I LIKE the ads, but I understand why they’re there and why they’re targeted. Is it weird? Yes. Will I get completely bent out of shape because some ads show up that seem targeted towards me? No.
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rooo this is so annoying I have a blackberry so everytime I check my mails I have those ads – really really annoying
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Emails should be off limits and private but some how I always felt they were easy targets. Should this be allowed? Absolutely not! There has to be areas of our lives that marketers can not access.
I am not surprised that cookies are used to serve up more targetted ads but YouTube pulling in someones age from a Yahoo e-mail sounds a little too much like a long bow to me…does this really happen?