Privacy | Does Google Chuckle When It Reads Your Email?

Do you get any of your bills delivered by email? Do you realize that your email provider can read those bills? Google routinely reads the content of your emails.  This is how they are able to place targeted advertising on your Gmail account.

Rather than being ashamed for peaking into your personal business, Google is now offering a service to complement this invasion of privacy. They are offering an app that will keep track of the bills that you have delivered via email and will let you know which of them are coming due. I suspect that there are a lot of people who will find the convenience appealing. There are also a lot of people (including me) who find it creepy.

Google announces it can now monitor your bills

Figuring out how broke you’re about to become has never been easier: a new feature being rolled out by Google is letting mobile app users see when their bills are due and how much is owed with a single prompt.

The search engine announced in a statement on Tuesday this week that a new feature in the Google app available for Android- and iOS-powered devices will let users quickly see if they have any bills coming up by simply saying a few words into the phone or tablet’s microphone.

“When you can't remember whether you've paid your bills — or you simply can't remember how much money you need to pay — you can now just ask Google,” the company said. “Tap the mic on the Google app and say, ‘Show me my bills’ or ‘My bills due this week.’ If you have the payment due date and amount in your Gmail, you’ll see a quick summary of upcoming and past bills. Pretty handy, huh?”

Google has already taken a tremendous amount of heat in recent years after implementing an automated system that scans the contents of emails sent into its Gmail service in order to deliver customers more individualized services and advertisements. Although privacy advocates are likely to oppose the company’s newest feature, the Wall Street Journal was quick to report that users who’ve downloaded the eponymous Google mobile app (formerly known as “Google Search”) must opt-in to the latest service.

“These features are available to users of Google’s search app who have turned on the Google Now feature and given Google permission to access information from their Gmail accounts,” Alistair Barr reported on Tuesday this week for the paper.

Once the user does opt in, Barr added, Google lets them known on an individualizes basis if certain content coming into their online accounts, like a Gmail message about a bill that’ll soon be due, is being fed into the mobile app.

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