Last month, Google released an updated version of the Gmail app for iOS that brought background email refreshes, a new feature in iOS 7. This essentially means that your emails are on your device before you open Gmail. This cuts down on the time it takes to access new messages from the moment you open the app. But that's not all that Google changed.
In the blog post announcing the update, Google also mentioned that Gmail will now support single sign-on, just like other Google apps (Maps, Drive, YouTube, and Chrome) do on iOS. This sounds very practical in theory, one username and password for all apps, but as it turns out, it probably serves other purposes as well.
First spotted by Quartz. Google’s new single sign-on feature isn’t a move to make things easier for users of the company’s services. It’s a move to allow it to collect more information from Gmail and other services for advertisers and marketers. The real reason the company brought single sign-on to its iOS app (it already exists on Android) is to track your movements, your habits, and collect them across each of its apps.
If you send a video to a friend using Gmail, Google will read it and keep the information. If you watch a video on YouTube and you're not logged in, the company can't recognize what you're watching, how long you're watching it, or if you stopped watching it before you finished watching it. It can't track what your next video will be, etc. With single sign-on, things change. As with Android, when you use Google apps for iOS, Google can track your movements and monitor your habits to provide advertisers with more information to help them create better ads, but also to serve you ads that interest you.
If you use Google products, you have already agreed to the company's terms. By agreeing, you have allowed Google to track your habits. Let's recall that Google's new privacy policy was established in 2012 and the changes were considered a violation of EU law. Google has already been fined by France, Spain and the Netherlands for privacy violations, but of course the privacy policy has not changed.
The current privacy policy allows Google to collect and combine information from all of its services, and single sign-on is the most powerful and effective implementation of that policy.
