Google literally giving me sex talk lines.

  • grue@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    The only “mildly infuriating” part about this is the stray mark you made on the screenshot.

    The other stuff – the offensive ad and the abuse of Grace Hopper’s name – is more than “mildly.”

  • pete_the_cat@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    I’ve used Gmail since 2005 and don’t ever remember seeing ads, but then again I use ad blockers on pretty much all my devices.

  • beirdobaggins@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    I moved my personal email domain to fastmail. I’ve been very happy with it. I am using the Standard plan at $50 per year.

    It’s nice being the customer instead of the product.

    They can also host static web sites for no additional cost on this plan. So I canceled my web hosting plan too.

    • redfellow@sopuli.xyz
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      9 months ago

      That’s a terrible idea, as all your registered accounts on that mail address are now just one minimum wage customer service worker away from getting intercepted by a hacker. Just getting dns redirected is enough.

      Edit; Misread. Though you were selfhosting email.

  • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
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    9 months ago

    I’m more concerned that they reanimated a 30-years-dead Rear Admiral, a founding mother of computer science, and assigned her to help your job search.

    B-movie premise: the dead rise and the capitalists realize that they’re cheaper labour than the current precariat.

  • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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    9 months ago

    IIT: People who’ve never used Gmail complaining about how it’s full of ads. They only appear in the “promotions” tab, which is where Gmail sends stuff that’s already borderline spam. In other words you don’t see ads unless you go looking for them.

    • Pandantic [they/them]@midwest.socialOP
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      9 months ago

      I use gmail a lot on my phone, and I have seen ads, but I’ve never seen an ad like that. My point was I was mildly irritated that it gave me a sex line ad. It made me feel angry for the trafficked sex workers probably running a majority of those lines. I generally would imagine Google to be more choosy about their adds. This ad felt icky, which mildly irritated me.

      • DudeDudenson@lemmings.world
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        9 months ago

        I mean google is one of the companies that tracks you the most these days so it would be unusual for it to show you an ad for something you or someone with your ad tracking id haven’t shown any interest in the past.

        Just saying.

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      9 months ago

      If OP has personalized ads even enabled.

      The times I turned off personalized ads, were the times google ads went really wild. This was both for regular website ads as well as youtube ads. So many cosmetic product ads…

      I had to turn it back on again because they were at least partly interesting compared to “SiCk oF aCnE?! sIcK of pImPleS??!”

      • Victor@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Yeah, I have turned off personalized ads and I mostly get these inappropriate dating ads. I guess it’s their way of annoying me into enabling personalization.

        • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          Do you get the super creepy ‘easten European girls are popular because of their traditional values…’ and the I’ve that’s ‘Chinese women want to come and study in but need loving middle aged men to have sex with them while they’re here…’ I’m paraphraseing of course but that’s basically what they say.

          Makes me laugh when everything is sanitized because advertiser’s don’t want to appear next to anything untoward then the adverts are for human traffickers.

          Though honestly the ‘student was expelled for inventing a more efficient heater’ advert is possibly worse, of course he was expelled he broke the laws of physics, he should have been arrested! Why is such an obvious scam allowed but a friendly Australian can’t call his cobba a cunt?

          • Victor@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            I do rarely use Gmail on my phone, but those probably showed up in some form of another at some point, lol

    • centof@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      That’s an email client. Do you have a email provider you like that is compatible with it?

      • pHr34kY@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Gmail works with it.

        But Gmail could technically pump the same ads over IMAP if they wanted to.

        • RedstoneValley@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          Technically it’s not the same, in case of IMAP they would need to literally put spam mails into your account. As opposed to having visual elements in the UI that pretend to be an email. Might not feel like a big difference but actively poisoning the users inbox is pretty bad.

          • Victor@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Yeah, while technically possible, I don’t see that happening for the exact reason you said. 👍

      • zweistein@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Mailbox.org is pretty nice, I’ve been using it since a few months now, because it’s compatible with basically all email clients (unlike protonmail) and they have a very cheap plan too.

        • gigachad@feddit.de
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          9 months ago

          Using it for almost 3 years now, it’s great. Together with K9-Mail ofc!

        • centof@lemm.ee
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          9 months ago

          Thanks for sharing, I am seriously considering it. I just have a hard time justifying the purchase to myself. I kinda worry that I am just acting on a somewhat emotional fear of being watched.

  • AVincentInSpace@pawb.social
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    9 months ago

    I don’t see anyone else here recommending K-9 Mail for Android, and I think that’s sad because it’s really good. Open source, supports viewing message headers, multi-account, hides remote images by default to prevent tracking…

      • voxel@sopuli.xyz
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        9 months ago

        which

        1. can be disabled
        2. that tab is already a place where gmail puts spam ads
          (kinda a smart decision to add their own ads there too lol)
        • Victor@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Are you paying for Librewolf? I’m not sure what you meant to say.

              • null@slrpnk.net
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                9 months ago

                Eh, by default FF has a bunch of telemetry enabled. Nowhere near as bad as the others, but Librewolf has that all disabled out of the box.

                • Victor@lemmy.world
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                  9 months ago

                  Surely the telemetry only consists of stuff that they use to give back to the community? Usage data to drive innovation?

                  I might be naive, but that’s how I imagine it.

              • Chakravanti@sh.itjust.works
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                9 months ago

                Selling usage data to google. Yeah. Definately.

                As per Librewolf it’s not business product.

                Free is not at no cost but rather Free as in Freedom. Production may but paid for but request or donation but it is even then still not a business product. It is not a capitalist product. Free is Freedom truly in this sense even though production may cost money in this capitalist tyrrany. Cost is, again, by choice, pursuit/desire of particularity by a nonprogrammer, or donation.

                Surely Mozilla was built like that but google bought it is in a certainly assassination objective. No doubt. That’s the whole fucking point of this thread’s post and observation. Y’all fucking quick about it.

  • irotsoma@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Google knows what you like and these days they will take any ad because they fired all the screening staff. My ads are usually pretty average since I opt out of everything I possibly can opt out of and I use Startpage for search, so they aren’t as targeted. That’s one positive thing about Google. They started as a relatively ethical company for an ad company, so there’s a lot of code and best practices in place for opting out of things. That is fading, but it’s way better than others. Like Facebook showing ads for things I searched for a few seconds ago on Amazon and stuff like that.

      • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Facebook has crawlers that follow you around the web. It’s not that Amazon is sharing info, it’s that Facebook is tracking your browsing history (if you let it).

  • Kairos@lemmy.today
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    9 months ago

    Looks like someone fat fingered while cropping. It happens to everyone.

  • EuroNutellaMan@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    this should be more than mildly infuriating to you.

    You might want to ditch google for something like proton if you can, and if you can’t use Thunderbird to view your emails.

    • voxel@sopuli.xyz
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      9 months ago

      the ads only appear in the “Promotions/Ads” tab, which is an email category for junk and ads. (ones that don’t include any useful information but come from legitimate companies and don’t qualify for the “Spam” tab)
      It CAN be disabled (together with the whole sorting feature, which is spyware anyway (enabling it automatically grants google permission to look at your emails))
      and also i think the decision to add their own ads there is actually pretty clever lol.

      • dreamer@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        Yep, and so you know there’s a lot to complain about if Google, that decision is not one of them .

      • Pandantic [they/them]@midwest.socialOP
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        9 months ago

        It would be clever if they fit and I might actually click on them.

        Honestly, I did the whole “inbox filter tabs” thing a long time ago, and it was real useful before when I had a few spammy, usually “news letter” or “promotion” email that I might use. But at this point it’s just where the email I don’t really want but don’t want to deal with go to die.

        I appreciate the info, though, and I’ve already turned it off, but I might just turn it back on because idgaf about the ads really since I barely look at that tab/section of my mail anyway. At his point, I’m prolly just going to go to proton mail for now and just update my email with my important contacts. I’ve been trying to get away from Google for a while, I just haven’t had the time to complete the transition on all services.

    • Pandantic [they/them]@midwest.socialOP
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      9 months ago

      I definitely need to make that switch, and I’ve been “in the process” of making the switch for a while.

      I will take your advice about Thunderbird because my work email is gmail only.