Google is hankering to flood your inbox with all the political spam we’ve clearly been missing
Your inbox’s spam filter has just one job: don’t show you messages you’re not interested in reading. In the bad old days, that required tons of manual rule lists, and spammers were quick to adapt. The arrival of Gmail and its impressively low-effort spam filter was nothing less than a godsend. Earlier this summer, though, we learned of a Google plan that would break the way Gmail’s spam filter operated, intentionally letting political emails slip through. Today we get word that the Federal Election Commission has approved this scheme, and Google intends to move ahead with a pilot.
Google proposed a program to the FEC that would allow registered political candidates to distribute bulk emails through Gmail, without being unceremoniously directed to everyone’s spam boxes. The test would run through January, and messages would include a “prominent notification” allowing people to opt out. Unfortunately, it sounds like that would be on a sender-by-sender basis, and Google may not give users the ability to opt out from all future political mailings included in this project in one fell swoop.
The FEC clearly liked what it heard, including Google’s promises of nonpartisanship, and in a draft ruling expressed its approval. Subsequently, the company confirmed to 9to5Google that it’s going ahead with the plan, and will monitor feedback from everyone involved.
Google shares that its intent behind all of this “is to assess alternative ways of addressing concerns from bulk senders, while giving users clear controls over their inboxes to minimize unwanted email.”
It sure feels like Gmail already had clear controls for minimizing unwanted email, didn’t it, though? This seems like something other than “minimizing.”
