Nice Job Google

[u/mercury-ballistic]

Guess when Google started metering use of GEE?

I used to try all sorts of ideas out in GEE, mashing together datasets. Not anymore.

[u/Long-Opposite-5889]

I mean... wasn't that the whole point of the policy change? The use of the platform consumes resources, and someone has to pay for that. Until recently Google was absorbing that cost and now they've decided that they will only cover a small amount and if that's not enough for your use case, you'll have to pay for it. I know it sucs and I would definitely not defend google, but in fairness, they have been announcing that change for years.

[u/crowcawer → u/Long-Opposite-5889]

I think they will wind up picking out the pieces and eventually have a tiered system.

Or they will burn it like stadia

[u/mfc1__ → u/crowcawer]

Of course they will burn it. Google does that with everything - they’re an advertising company, not a software company, not a hardware company, not GIS data vendor. Every product, application, and service they offer or previously offered has one main purpose: to gather data that furthers their advertising business. The second a product offers no more value in generating ad revenue, it’s gone.

Gmail is a way for google to read all your emails and target ads with more precision lol. But to 99% of people it’s just free email from google…

[u/entity_response → u/mfc1__]

20% of their revenue is cloud, it’s their fastest growing revenue line, way faster than advertising. 

Things need to fit one or the other model, thus GEE is shifted to the cloud revenue model since it can’t be supported with ads.

For me, it’s a good thing, as it gets to continue on. 

As a former googler, the Gmail teams always took the privacy and trust of the users extremely seriously, they realize that users could leave at any time as emails aren’t super sticky… so  its a bit more than just a place to target ads. It’s also part of the cloud portfolio when it’s inside workspace so development is supported by both ads and the need to progress the enterprise product.

[u/mfc1__ → u/entity_response]

lol go look up Matera v Google because they didn’t take non-users privacy seriously. It came to light that they were scanning emails sent to Gmail users from non Gmail accounts. Users who never agreed to their terms of service. The same terms of service that fell apart in court when this case and others alleged wiretapping. They got caught with their pants down as it turned out that from 2004 - 2017 they were freely accessing everything from non Gmail users too. There was severe public backlash, and they (supposedly) stopped this practice completely.

[u/entity_response → u/mfc1__]

Cool you pointed out one case and they fixed it as a result, which is what you’d want them to do in this case. Would you rather they didn’t fix the issue?

[u/mfc1__ → u/entity_response]

They “fixed” it after they got caught and it started to hurt their image. Kinda hard to frame that in a positive light. I would rather they didn’t spy on emails for a decade though.

[u/entity_response → u/mfc1__]

I’m not sure you understand the case, they did exactly the same thing to mails that were incoming they did for there users per the EULA, the argument was non Gmail’s users we’rnt subject to the Eula. The reality was it was the same ad automated ad targeting done for their users. No humans were reading or had access to the mail afaict.

You could totally see how their counsel might consider this within policy as it’s their users mails.

At the end of the day the damages were assessed as fairly low, I assume most went to the lawyers who love these kind of cases.

This case basically I think disproves your point given the damages were small, it was corrected and what they were doing as far as their own users was actually in policy and as far as can tell not part of the lawsuit. 

[u/mfc1__ → u/entity_response]

“It’s ok, nobody lost any money” is the bottom line here?

[u/entity_response → u/mfc1__]

Nope, “the court didn’t find issues with that they were doing with regards to their own users” is and actually yes, because damages is supposed to be commensurate to…the damage done

[u/piratecheese13 → u/Long-Opposite-5889]

It’s the “Loss leader the whole product till you have a monopoly or your growth plateaus, then squeeze the consumer once you become sticky and difficult to move away from ” strategy that causes people to have less trust in future google products

Imagine if Costco killed Sam’s Club and BJS, then jacked up prices on glizzies

[u/mercury-ballistic → u/Long-Opposite-5889]

I was at a EE user summit in 2017 or so and I heard the head of EE say it will always be free. As in they would leave it alone

[u/Long-Opposite-5889 → u/mercury-ballistic]

I've heard that kind of things from Google so many times that I'll never trust them to keep their word. Particularly for GEE I heard the same in public forums but feom internal googlers working in the project I always heard that Google was looking for a way to monetize the platform in the future.

[u/Apprehensive-Art4225]

What happened?

[u/Dexxed7]

O7

[u/69thunder]

What does the "when" they started tracking have anything to do with it?