Google said to be taking steps to keep political campaign emails out of Gmail spam bin
- Reference: 1656455354
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/06/28/gmail_political_campaigns_spam/
- Source link:
The elections watchdog declined to confirm receiving the supposed Google filing, obtained by Axios, though a spokesperson said the FEC can be expected to publish an advisory opinion upon review if Google made such a submission.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. If the web giant's [1]alleged plan gets approved, political campaign emails that aren't deemed malicious or illegal will arrive in Gmail users' inboxes with a notice asking recipients to approve continued delivery.
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The reason Google appears to have done so is that earlier this month, 27 Republicans [3]introduced a bill called the Political Bias in Algorithm Sorting (BIAS) Emails Act.
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The proposed law aims to "hold Big Tech platforms accountable for using biased algorithms that take control away from consumers and alter the way users are able to see emails from political campaigns," as US Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) put it.
This draft legislation, as it stands, would make it illegal for an email service provider to apply a filtering algorithm to email messages from an account from a political campaign unless the email recipient took action to apply the filter.
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It would also require email service providers (cough, cough, Google) to provide quarterly transparency reports revealing details about filtering applied to Republican and Democratic campaign emails.
Hangouts hangs up: Google chat app shuts this year [7]READ MORE
The Republican-backed bill follows the release of a North Carolina State University research paper that found email service providers' spam filters exhibited political bias toward one party or another.
The [8]report [PDF] – titled, A Peek into the Political Biases in Email Spam Filtering Algorithms During US Election 2020 – stated that Gmail marked more right-leaning messages as spam while Outlook and Yahoo marked more left-leaning messages as spam.
"Gmail marks a significantly higher percentage (67.6 percent) of emails from the right as spam compared to the emails from left (just 8.2 percent)," the report stated. "Outlook is unfriendly to all campaign emails, more unfriendly to the left than to the right. It marks a higher percentage of left (95.8%) emails as spam than those of right (75.4 percent). Yahoo marks 14.2 percent more left emails as spam than the right emails."
The academics said there's no reason to believe these biases have been introduced deliberately. Rather, they're the product of the design of spam filtering algorithms and feedback mechanisms used to adjust filtering decisions.
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Their report does not address whether Gmail or other email services consider content quality (eg, excessive capitalization, divisive terminology, etc) in their spam determination calculations.
The authors argue that it's important for spam filtering mechanisms to be fair while conceding it's not an easy problem. Attempted adjustments, they say, may degrade filter efficacy and result in more unwanted emails.
Letting every single first-time campaign email through is certain to do that. ®
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[1] https://www.axios.com/2022/06/27/google-campaign-email-spam-gmail
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YrvOY0EV7Hl-fT2AhIW5FwAAAJQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://www.scott.senate.gov/media-center/press-releases/scott-thune-senate-republicans-introduce-political-bias-emails-act
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YrvOY0EV7Hl-fT2AhIW5FwAAAJQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YrvOY0EV7Hl-fT2AhIW5FwAAAJQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YrvOY0EV7Hl-fT2AhIW5FwAAAJQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/28/say_goodbye_to_google_hangouts/
[8] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.16743.pdf
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YrvOY0EV7Hl-fT2AhIW5FwAAAJQ&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Seen this poo before
It will work just like "opt-out" spam where a marketing category/list/phone is used only once before a new one is invented. Whether you opt out or not makes no difference.
I strike candidates off my ballot when they send me email or SMS spam.
Re: Seen this poo before
So... guess you probably don't vote for many races then eh? Maybe someone going for a water district seat and a judge or two? :)
That was my grave mistake... giving my real phone number on my voter registration. That changed when I moved and needed to update my registration. Hopefully that updated record will start making its way through their databases, wiping out my real number with the bogus one.
If fact, I didn't find out that governments sell these lists to anyone who can pony up the change. (They're not that expensive.) And I figured that out about 10-12 years ago when I gave a dedicated email address on my voter registration form and once the spam started spilling in, did some research and found that out.
Hint to Google
-> Google has reportedly asked the US Federal Election Commission for its blessing to exempt political campaign solicitations from spam filtering.
Why not ask the FEC if it can dump all political campaign solicitations in the bin. Get the senders to register an approved "sent from" address, and direct them straight to the bin.
In the UK we have the dubious pleasure of "party political broadcasts" on the television around general election time. I think about 10 people watch these. The rest put on the kettle and wait for them to finish. The collective "uhhhhhh" can be heard throughout the land. Politicians in their ivory towers think we listen for their every word. Whoever it is and whichever party it is, they are all much the same. From "there will be no whitewash at the White House" to "I did not inhale stateside", to "we are all in this together" in the UK. If I sound cynical it is with good reason.
This is why I run my own mail server with my spam filter. Because obviously this stuff is the very definition of spam.
This is spam...
... I don't want this rubbish in my mailbox. Thank you!
Spam me with your political message and I won't vote for you. It's as simple as that.
However politicians are about an order of magnitude worse than the rest of sales and marketing for thinking that the world is quivering with anticipation for their next fart, brain or otherwise, so the notion that their spam can do them harm will be incomprehensible to them.