According to a blog post on Google, the company will soon stop scanning emails in the Gmail service for advertising purposes.
Gmail scans your emails for various purposes. It tries to ensure that it does not contain unwanted or malicious programs, but it also uses the information it records for advertising purposes.
Data protection institutions have criticized Google several times for this practice, and Microsoft has not forgotten not to use the event for the same reason in the infamous advertising campaign Scroogled.
Google uses the information it receives from scans of e-mails combined with other information from each user from other sources, to display targeted ads.
Google states in Gmail Terms of Service:
Our automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide personalized product features such as custom search results, personalized advertising, and crawling of unwanted and malicious programs. This analysis takes place when the content is sent, received and stored.
Google's Diane Greene, he said change to a new publication on the official Google blog at 23 June 2017.
Gmail's G Suite is no longer used as a solution for customizing ads, and Google has decided to apply the process later this year and to the free Gmail service.
Free Gmail content will not be used or will be scanned for personalization of ads after this change. This decision aligns Gmail ads with how we adjust ads to other Google products
The decision was not taken by Google's advertising department, but by the company's Cloud department. The rationale behind the decision is that Google Cloud believes that organizations may not use Google services due to the privacy implications that accompany the scanning of emails for promotional purposes.
Google's G Suite never applied an email scan to serve ads to service users.
The result of course will be positive for users of the free Gmail service as the free Gmail will no longer show ads.
However, the ad selection process will use other available sources of information to show ads to Gmail users, for example from searches or YouTube activity.
Google is reportedly competing with Amazon and Microsoft in cloud Enterprise. The company's Cloud revenue increases as G Suite has more than 3 million users since June 2017 and its use has doubled since last year by large business customers according to the announcement.
George is still wondering what he is doing here….
Nephew