Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails For Gmail Ads (bloomberg.com)

Posted by msmash on from the change-of-heart dept.

Google will soon stop scanning emails received by some Gmail users, a practice that has allowed it to show them targeted advertising but which stirred privacy worries. From a report: The decision didn't come from Google's ad team, but from its cloud unit, which is angling to sign up more corporate customers. Alphabet's Google Cloud sells a package of office software, called G Suite, that competes with market leader Microsoft. Paying Gmail users never received the email-scanning ads like the free version of the program, but some business customers were confused by the distinction and its privacy implications, said Diane Greene, Google's senior vice president of cloud. "What we're going to do is make it unambiguous," she said. Ads will continue to appear inside the free version of Gmail, as promoted messages. But instead of scanning a user's email, the ads will now be targeted with other personal information Google already pulls from sources such as search and YouTube.

9 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. WHOA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Didn't see that coming.

    1. Re:WHOA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      I bet this is a pure money play. They likely realized ads for e-mail content have a lower return then from other data sources. Google has so many data sources on you, they no longer need e-mail content.

  2. We Already Know All About You by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    We already know all about you and no longer need to continue to read your email.

    Besides, your sad, pathetic lives were depressing our mail reading Ad-bots.

  3. So, how long until they shut it down? by Anubis+IV · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Kidding aside, if they're no longer mining free users for useful information, it becomes nothing more than a vehicle for delivering ads. Given that Gmail is a gateway into the Google ecosystem for a lot of people, I seriously doubt that they'd kill it entirely, but I wouldn't bet on seeing any more major increases to the storage space allotted for the free tier.

    1. Re:So, how long until they shut it down? by Zocalo · · Score: 2

      17GB if you did a security check or whatever it was a few years back. Thing is though, that's not just your email space - it's the total of your Google storage space for Drive and Photos as well, so if you are really into the Google ecosystem it can add up fast. Sure, you can have multiple free accounts, but that removes a lot of the convenience. As the poster above said, "we already know all about you and no longer need to continue to read your email"; for some users Google has well into diminishing returns on scanning their email, so why waste the CPU cycles?

      I suspect the hope now is that once people's free storage allocations are used up they'll switch to a paid for plan rather than delete stuff, which is basically paying through the nose per GB. Looking at the current plans, Google gets ~$200 per annum for each TB of disk sold in 100GB chunks, which is a pretty good RoI even before you factor in that Google is almost certainly doing a *lot* of de-duplication on the stored data.

      --
      UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
  4. Read what they said by al0ha · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Google will no longer scan emails for the purposes of advertising targeting. They never said they would no longer scan emails altogether.

    Speak No Evil :P

    --
    Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
    1. Re:Read what they said by Rockoon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Exactly. Google now scans your emails for a completely different, yet evidently more profitable, reasons.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    2. Re:Read what they said by Albanach · · Score: 5, Interesting

      They never said they would no longer scan emails altogether.

      I'd be pretty pissed if they did. It's nice to grab your phone and see that evening's flight details, or get a reminder that you have a bill due in three days, etc.

      These are features that make my life easier and are only possible by having a computer scan my email.

    3. Re:Read what they said by spire3661 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Google sent me an email the other day telling me that it was going to start adding events to my calendar from ALL emails. They were telling me they were literally going to fill my calendar with spam appointments. I was auto-opted in and this would be be my only notification of it. How can you trust a calendar you cant explicitly control? I imagine a future where people show up to events they didnt sign up for simply because some spammer sent them a properly formatted email.

      Google is useful until it isnt. Dont fall in love with this 'feature', it will be used to spam you

      --
      Good-bye