[ad_1]
Mountain View (dpa) – Google has defended the controversial practice that app developers can scan digital mailboxes on the GMail service.
Users will always be asked if they want to grant an app access to their Google Mail account – and developers will be audited by the Internet company, Google said in a blog post. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that two US email service providers had read thousands of user messages to train their software .
One of the companies, Edison, offers automated responses to e-mails formulated by Computer . First, employees had learned the algorithm with data from their own mailboxes, said CEO Michael Berner's "Wall Street Journal."
The amount of data was not sufficient. As a result, two employees have been disabled to view the personal e-mail messages of "hundreds" of users and to check if the automatic responses match. As a security measure, the computers were set up so that they could not download anything – and the user data was rendered unreadable. In addition, the two experts in artificial intelligence have signed a commitment not to disclose the contents of emails.
The other company, called "Path Street", by the Wall Street Journal, determines the frequency with which they were read by advertisers. The system should first separate private and commercial e-mails. This is decided based on e-mail addresses and keywords such as "grandmother". In 2016, however, Return Path discovered that the algorithm inadvertently classified "millions" of private e-mails as commercial, according to the newspaper, citing an informed person. To improve the software, two data analysts read 8,000 emails and marked them by hand, they said.
The standard query that users see when they grant an application access to their GMail account requests that they read, send, delete and manage emails. While the two companies' approach could be covered by these formulations, it might have been difficult for users to know that humans and not just machines could read the texts. It is "the usual practice" for developers of such applications, the newspaper said the former chief technology officer of eDataSource company, a competitor of Return Path.
Google pointed out that app providers with access to the GMail account have been the subject of a multi-step review. The Internet company itself has stopped evaluating the content of the software advertisements last year to customize the advertisements displayed on GMail. On Google itself, users would be allowed to read users' emails only in exceptional cases, such as abuse or technical problems.
Report in the "Wall Street Journal"
Google's blog entry
Source link
