Google will no longer scan Gmail to target ads

Google plans to abandon its long-standing practice of scanning user email in its Gmail service to serve targeted advertising.

Google said it does not scan the email of paying corporate customers of its G Suite of services, but it made the policy change — announced in a company blog post on Friday — on its free consumer version to eliminate confusion and create one uniform policy toward Gmail.

As it builds its Google Cloud business for selling internet infrastructure and services to corporate customers, Google is trying to ease concerns that it will use data from corporate customers to help its mainstay advertising business.

Google plans to carry out the changes to the Gmail ad policy “later this year.”

The company will continue to serve ads in Gmail, which has more than 1.2 billion users, but it will target those ads based on information it has already gathered from other Google services, instead of the content of email.

“This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalise ads for other Google products,” Diane Greene, Google’s senior vice president in charge of Google Cloud, wrote in the post.

Google introduced Gmail in 2004, and it quickly gained popularity because it offered improved search options and more storage. Gmail is now the most widely used web email service.

But the service has been criticised by privacy advocates for scanning email to generate contextually aware ads. The ads in email bothered users more than other targeted advertising found across the web, because users are more touchy about the privacy of email versus, for example, browsing history.