Google pledges to stop scanning emails in Gmail for personalized ads

Advertising giant Google announced on Friday that later this year it will no longer scan user emails for personalized ads in its free Gmail service, stamping out a policy that has long rankled privacy advocates.

In a post to the company's official blog, Google Cloud Senior Vice President Diane Green revealed that once the change takes place, Gmail will serve ads based on a user's settings. Presumably, ads will still be tailored based on the account's search results.

The change brings free Gmail accounts in line with the paid G Suite Gmail service, which already did not scan ads for personalization. After the switch, both free Gmail and G Suite Gmail will be under the same advertising policy.

"Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change," Green wrote. "This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for other Google products. Ads are shown based on users' settings. Users can change those settings at any time, including disabling ads personalization."

Gmail has 1.2 billion users worldwide, and competes with Apple's iCloud mail service. Unlike Gmail, Apple's iCloud is not ad-supported.

"No other email service protects its users from spam, hacking, and phishing as successfully as Gmail," Green said.

86 Comments

gatorguy 24603 comments · 13 Years

About 7 years ago

This will be very appreciated news for some number of Gmail users. Of course this might have been prompted by Judge Koh who clearly disliked the practice and had full intention of issuing rules under which Google would be permitted to do so. Far easier and more PR worthy to get out ahead of it and simply stop doing it altogether.

ericthehalfbee 4489 comments · 13 Years

"Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change."

So what WILL they be scanned and used for?

anantksundaram 20390 comments · 18 Years

I was using Gmail less and less, now to the point of near non-use, because of this. It might be too little too late.

Also, I think iOS may have played a part in killing it off since no ads were possible.

ericthehalfbee said:

"Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change."

So what WILL they be scanned and used for?

Probably the same thing Apple scans user email for: Spam filtering and malware/phishing protection. I think I also read something a couple years back (perhaps earlier) that email services like those provided by Apple and Google also scan for child porn?

steven n. 1229 comments · 13 Years

gatorguy said:

This will be very appreciated news for some number of Gmail users.

This is even more welcome news to people NOT Google Service users and have never agreed to Google's TOS but they still scan emails going to/from those people.