New Defense: I Didn’t Write That Email Response, Google Did
(November 6, 2015) Don’t have time to draft a response to your emails? No need to worry. Gmail will draft a response for you.
Google is rolling out a new Gmail feature called Smart Reply, which determines what emails need an answer and then gives you three suggested responses based upon the emails you receive. “For those emails that only need a quick response, it can take care of the thinking and save precious time spent typing,” Google noted in its announcement.
As to privacy, Google stated: “In developing Smart Reply we adhered to the same rigorous user privacy standards we’ve always held—in other words, no humans reading your email.” Rather, it is machines with artificial intelligence that learn “to recognize emails that need responses and to generate the natural language responses on the fly.”
For example, if an email sends an invitation for Thanksgiving, Smart Reply suggests “Count us in!,” “We’ll be there!” and “Sorry, we won’t be able to make it.” When the email inquires about a server issue to the IT department, the suggested responses are “I’ll check on it,” “I’ll see if I can find out,” and “I’m on it.”
During Google’s development of the “machine-learned system” using real emails and replies, the prototype had a “propensity to respond with ‘I love you’ to seemingly anything.”
Smart Reply shows the continued advancement of artificial intelligence and machine-to-machine communication. It also highlights that the email content is searched by machines, raising privacy issues such as whether there is any expectation of privacy in emails. The new feature also underscores the importance of being careful as to what you put into an email because you never know who (or what machine) will be reading and responding to it.
Balough Law Offices assists companies with developing privacy policies for their websites and their work environments. We also help clients protect their privacy and intellectual property. We do not use machines to respond to our emails.