Nine Years Later
overall 6.4drawn in v5 · Balloons look again
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Google May Start Reading Your Gmail and Photos to Target Ads
Google quietly updated its privacy policy to say that data from Gmail and Google Photos could be used to power 'personal intelligence' features and target advertising. The company had previously promised not to scan Gmail content for ad purposes after dropping that practice in 2017.
Sources: The Verge · Ars Technica
- X algorithm factor 7
- The punchline 'Sorry about your dad, urns are 20% off' is a clean, quotable gut-punch that works standalone without needing the Gmail context explained—people will quote-tweet it as their own creepy-ad story.
- Conceptual accuracy 6
- Captures the emotional betrayal of the broken 2017 promise well, but the specific mechanism (Gmail/Photos content feeding ad targeting) is only implied, not shown; a reader unfamiliar with the story gets the vibe but not the 'Google reads your email' specifics.
- Humor dry 7 · nerdy 3 · zinger 8 · pithy 8
- The zinger is sharp and the understatement of grief-meets-upsell is dry and effective, but there's zero technical/nerdy angle on how personal intelligence actually works, making it more generic 'creepy ads' humor than a tech-insider joke.
- Visual clarity 6
- The 'LLM' label on panel 3's character is a jarring, unexplained left-field choice—it's not a chatbot interaction, it's an ad notification, so slapping an LLM sprite in physically next to the user muddies who's 'speaking' and why an LLM is discussing urn discounts.