Pinterest’s Testing a Recent System That Would Scan Your Emails to Understand Your Interests

Pinterest is experimenting with a brand new process, which it hopes could offer an answer for improved ad targeting within the app: scanning your email inbox to customize your Pinterest experience.

In line with Patent Drop, which tracks registered patents, Pinterest recently filed an summary of the brand new process, which might essentially scrape your inbox to glean more insight into what it is advisable to see.

As per Patent Drop:

“The system would, with user authorization, undergo an email [account] that a user has connected to their Pinterest account to discover topics that they might be considering. Based on the model’s findings, Pinterest will then serve you custom content, auto-generating boards and surfacing posts based in your indicated interests. For instance, when you join for a newsletter about gardening, Pinterest’s AI may fill your boards with gardening suggestions and inspiration. If it stumbles on an email about travel bookings to Costa Rica, it could put outfit ideas or restaurant recommendations in your feed.”

Which seems fraught with privacy concerns at a time when privacy is a key focus for a lot of regulators.

“This technique relies on a machine learning model that essentially makes your emails the dataset it learns from: It evaluates emails to discover recent topics of interest, update existing topics, or ‘simply record the knowledge as user data as the premise of constructing further enhancements or revisions to the user’s preferences’. The system may resolve the ‘strength and sentiment’ of a user’s affinity for a subject based on how often it comes up of their inbox and the way it pertains to the user’s current Pinterest habits.”

Yeah, I’m undecided that that is going to pass the GDPR test – but conceptually, when you were to achieve user permission, and be certain that their personal info was not misused after being accessed, it might be one other solution to higher understand user preferences, then show them related content in accordance with their interests.

Though I can’t see many individuals giving Pinterest the go-ahead to scan their private messages.

Since it’s not only regulators which can be increasingly concerned about data privacy, but users as well, with WhatsApp, for instance, seeing significant growth, particularly in North America, as people pull back from public sharing of content, and retreat to more enclosed, private messaging spaces.

WhatsApp’s gaining ground since it’s a trusted platform, where users know that they’ll share whatever they like, without fear of it getting used against them. And on this context, I can’t see how Pinterest would give you the option to sell a major variety of users on letting its system take a take a look at their emails for such purpose.

And it won’t be overly effective either way, as Patent Drop further notes:

“Email inboxes aren’t all the time as clean cut as this patent lays out. Pinterest has to ensure its tech doesn’t study spam, work and private emails because it makes its predictions, especially since machine learning models are only nearly as good as the info they’re trained on.”

Yeah, I’m undecided that is the way in which – and interestingly, it’s also price noting that Google halted its scanning of non-public Gmail content for ad targeting in 2017, after significant criticism of this approach.  

That’s particularly relevant on this case, because Pinterest CEO Bill Ready is a former Google exec, so you’d assume that he’d be well aware of the negative response this approach received even back then.

And it might likely be even less welcomed in the present data protection climate.

Either way, plainly Pinterest will at the least attempt to see if it may possibly make this approach work, because it seeks recent ways to maximise ad targeting amid evolving data privacy shifts.