It is possible that your gmail is destroying the emails that arrive and do not know. The fault is for forgotten adjustment

Dozens of readers of The country They complained that some of the Newsletters received contained “rude errata”. Meaningless phrases, words that seemed terribly chosen …

When doing the checks, the technical team of The country realized that Newsletters They did not contain those errors, the writing was adequate. But in the receptor mailbox they were modified.

Why is it important. The ruling was not in the newspaper, but in Gmail. Those who protested had activated the automatic translator into Spanish, so that any mail received was seen in this language.

The problem is that this translator acts even in mails that are already in Spanish, turning words when detecting English where there was no.

• Where he put “secret military plans”, appeared “Airplanes Secret military “.
• Where he put “Trump uses the power of the State to blackmail institutions”, appeared “Trump uses the power of the State to sing to institutions “.

The context. Gmail is The most used mail service in the world, and many users have activated their translator “always translate automatically.” This function, as we have seen, operates even about texts already written in your language.

Between the lines. What began as a sum of readers complaints has exposed a much greater problem: platforms can alter content without anyone knowing, at least for a while.

The issuer sends a message, the receiver reads another, and none suspects that there is a tool in the background by modifying words.

The threat. If Gmail can change “siege” by “seminar”, another of the examples cited by the newspaper, can also introduce intentional biases. Or forced.

For example, a government order can force automatically replace “Gulf of Mexico” by “Gulfo de América” In all emails. Users would read it and normalize without knowing that the content has been manipulated.

Yes, but. This automatic customization is born from a good idea, is born from helping. The problem comes when the help becomes invasive, is not entirely well designed (no anglicisms in Spanish from homonymous words between languages) and is opaque. Nothing made those affected think that the fault came from there.

It does not seem fair to trust years of use of a tool to which at the time the user activated it or granted certain permits if nothing that happens later acts as a subtle reminder.

In the foreground. For the first time, readers were not reading what journalists had written. And neither the first nor the second were aware of it.

It is the symptom of an era where sometimes machines make decisions about the information we consume without transparency or real control.

In Xataka | Hotmail changed the storage, Gmail brought the search. What is coming now will eliminate writing

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