Google Stops Scanning And Reading Users' Gmail Inboxes For Ad Personalization

Gmail

In order to have a high converting advertisements, the materials need to be shown to the appropriate viewers at the right time and at the right place.

Google has been one of a few that is known to thrive on ads by targeting people with great precision. One of the many ways the company can get data about its users, is by reading their Gmail inboxes.

Until the announcement, the company routinely scan the inboxes of its free users to better target them with ads. Using the data it gets from users' emails, Google combines that information with everything else it knows about that user to build an advertising profile for the user.

Google isn't scanning users who subscribed to its G Suite services. G Suite is Google's cloud apps service for business. It's a paid service so Google isn't showing ads and doesn't scan its content.

According to Diane Greene, Google's senior VP for Google Cloud:

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

What's more, Google's G Suite business bundle have been gaining more enterprise users in the past year, with more than 3 million companies paying for the service, the company said.

Gmail

Google won't make Gmail ad free. But it's worth noting that Google is already having a huge database of users' advertising profile. With Gmail having 1.2 billion users, additional information about its users won't make any change to how its advertising products work.

Given with the many products and services it has, the company already knows about pretty much everything about all of its users.

Google in scanning Gmail users' inboxes, was highly controversial since it was introduced in 2014. But the advantages of the service were clear: at that time, most web mail accounts offered a very small amount of storage. For example, HotMail allowed 2MB. Google on the other hand, was able to give gigabytes of storage.

While users were likely to hate Google for scanning their inboxes, they were liking the huge storage. So at the time, Google got away with it.

Published: 
24/06/2017