That's a pretty good blanket statement, hard to see how they could be twisting words here except as jvehent said, they may in the future.
That being said, it is unsettling they have the feature. A lot of people, me included, were upset when Google started reading our emails for ads. Slowly, people started accepting that was the norm, and there is a lot less fuss over it now, bigger other battles to fight with the NSA and other privacy issues.
Whose to say what we say out loud is more private than emails? It really could be a matter of time until that expectation of privacy of the spoken word is diminished with the rise of Alex and the like.
There are a lot of useful things a smartphone could do with an always on microphone. It could hear you arranging to meet up with a friend, and offer to create a reminder based on the details. It could warn you if the restaurant you're going to is closed. It could keep notes on all your conversations for all those times you forget something your friend said yesterday.
It could be pretty awesome, if only we could trust anyone to do this kind of thing.
I'm pretty sure they didn't when it first started in the early 00's, and it was sort of big news when they explicitly updated their terms to say they did as recently as 2014.
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That's a pretty good blanket statement, hard to see how they could be twisting words here except as jvehent said, they may in the future.
That being said, it is unsettling they have the feature. A lot of people, me included, were upset when Google started reading our emails for ads. Slowly, people started accepting that was the norm, and there is a lot less fuss over it now, bigger other battles to fight with the NSA and other privacy issues.
Whose to say what we say out loud is more private than emails? It really could be a matter of time until that expectation of privacy of the spoken word is diminished with the rise of Alex and the like.
There are a lot of useful things a smartphone could do with an always on microphone. It could hear you arranging to meet up with a friend, and offer to create a reminder based on the details. It could warn you if the restaurant you're going to is closed. It could keep notes on all your conversations for all those times you forget something your friend said yesterday.
It could be pretty awesome, if only we could trust anyone to do this kind of thing.
There's the rub, I think the NSA revelations and everyone collaborating with them, wittingly or unwittingly, proves we never can.
Has it ever been the case that Gmail didn't use email content for ads?
I'm pretty sure they didn't when it first started in the early 00's, and it was sort of big news when they explicitly updated their terms to say they did as recently as 2014.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/15/gmail-sca...
That being said, it is unsettling they have the feature.
What feature do they have?