Why Does Google Know Everything You’ve Bought on Amazon for the Past Six Years?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/opinion/google-purchases.html

by furcyd • 7 years ago

41 34 7 years ago

nytimes.com

Ill_ban_myself• 7 years ago

So, you're telling me it's finally time to market this plug & play home email server idea?

flukus2• 7 years ago

I've toyed with the idea myself, if you've worked around the lack of fixed IP's problem then sign me up.

xnyan• 7 years ago

Dynamic IP isn't really the issue. If a server can ping, it can update its DNS record. This obviously won't work without WAN connectivity, but neither will an email server and there lies the problem - consumer WAN access can't be 5 nines guaranteed and if we start engineering redundant fallover/load-balancing as a backup, what's the benefit of that over a hosted email service?

edit: practical problem no 2 is that if your residential ISP sees activity on the standard SMTP ports, it will quickly dropped like a hot potato (if they don't outright block unsolicited connections to those ports altogether which is common). Complaining about it will garner the response "sounds commercial to me, get a business account".

sp332• 7 years ago

Better get started, your competition just launched 6 months ago: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/review-helm-personal...

gsreenivas• 7 years ago

yep - co-founder of Helm here

here's another review from Micah Lee at The Intercept for anyone who's interested: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/30/helm-email-server/

NikkiA3• 7 years ago

Which will be useless given how many places blacklist the ISP IP ranges. You'll still want a email forwarder that can do the MX store & transfer for your server.

krageon4• 7 years ago

As long as you can send email to gmail and hotmail you've captured most email traffic people are likely to send. AFAIK, those services don't do what you describe.

pjc50• 7 years ago

People really do not want to run their own email. I used to, and have my own domain, but these days I pay a small ISP to manage it.

People might be OK with a quasi-managed solution where you pay a fee to the cloud provider to route in and out through a non-spam IP, and the provider does regular updates and configuration on the home server.

PhantomGremlin2• 7 years ago

Yahoo Mail is perhaps better for privacy? Even if they strive to be just as evil as Google, they are probably not nearly as competent.

In addition, Verizon, Yahoo's overlord, is probably run by "old school" telecom management that doesn't fully appreciate the financial goldmine of data mining.

thekyle• 7 years ago

probably not nearly as competent

I'm not sure this is a good argument for Yahoo! being better for privacy. Sure it means they're less likely to keep track of your purchase metadata from emails but it also means they're more likely to be hacked again and leak all your emails to the world.

4d66ba06• 7 years ago

A quote: "Scrolling through my Purchases, I couldn’t shake the most basic questions: What good reason is there for Google to store six years of detailed purchase information? Why can’t I delete it without deleting the emailed receipts? Why aren’t there default time limits on how long information is stored?"

lern_too_spel2• 7 years ago

These are silly questions. If you don't delete the email, Google still knows you made that purchase.

simongr3dal• 7 years ago

There's a difference between the emails being stored on googles servers and being available for data extraction by their algorithms, and them keeping the extracted and indexed/queryable data stored as well as the emails.

guy_c• 7 years ago

I think the only email services that are not going to mine your emails for valuable data are paid services that have made strong commitments to privacy. This was an interesting podcast interview with founder of Fastmail https://overcast.fm/+Hbyc810T0

username444• 7 years ago

I was about to counter that self hosted is an option, but that doesn't technically qualify as an "email service".

I'll note that the privacy centric services are only good as long as they're still maintained by a founder... you trust. If things go sideways, they can always be "acquired".

villgax• 7 years ago

Everybody should already migrate to something of their own domain or proton mail or the likes.

rchaud2• 7 years ago

I have a couple of domains, one self-configured on Digital Ocean and one on Bluehost. Bluehost has an 5-inbox email as part of the plan. Is it likely that Bluehost can do the same kind of surveillance that Gmail can?

Why Does Google Know Everything You’ve Bought on Amazon for the Past Six Years?

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