According to a Google blog post, the company will soon stop scanning emails in Gmail for advertising purposes.
Gmail scans your email messages for a variety of purposes. It tries to keep them free of spam or malware, but it also uses the information it collects for advertising purposes.
Privacy institutions have criticized Google several times for this practice, and Microsoft did not fail to use the fact for the same reason in the infamous Scroogled.
Google uses the information it obtains from scanning emails in combination with other information it has about each user from other sources, to display targeted ads.
Google states in the Gmail Terms of Service:
Our automated systems analyze your content (including email messages) to provide personalized product features, such as customized search results, personalized advertising, and spam and malware detection. This analysis occurs when content is sent, received, and stored.
Google's Diane Greene announced the change in a new post on the official Google blog on June 23, 2017.
G Suite's Gmail is no longer used as a solution for ad personalization, and Google has decided to implement the process later this year in the free Gmail service.
Free Gmail content will not be used or scanned for ad personalization after this change. This decision aligns Gmail ads with how we personalize ads across other Google products
The decision was not made by Google's advertising division, but by the company's Cloud division. The reasoning behind the decision is that Google's Cloud division believes that organizations may not use Google services because of the privacy implications that come with scanning emails for advertising purposes.
Google's G Suite has never implemented email scanning to serve ads to users of the service.
The result will of course be positive for users of the free Gmail service, as free Gmail will no longer display 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 Enterprise cloud services. The company's Cloud division's revenue is growing, as G Suite has more than 3 million users as of June 2017 and its usage has doubled from the previous year by large enterprise customers, according to the announcement.
