Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by icebraining on Friday June 23, 2017 @01:13PM (#14620833)

The article explains it plainly: they weren't getting the message to business people that Gmail on Google Apps isn't scanned despite free Gmail being, so they stopped scanning Gmail altogether.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by smeyer on Friday June 23, 2017 @01:24PM (#14620924)

Didn't they also get caught a couple of times scanning the email despite saying they weren't? I know there was a lawsuit alleging that they scanned the email of many university students after saying they wouldn't [0], which I think was settled for high 3 or low 4 figures per person, although I'm not sure (and wasn't a participant).

[0] http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/3/23/alumni-lawsuit-a...

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by dsp1234 on Friday June 23, 2017 @01:26PM (#14620947)

stopped scanning Gmail altogether.

Note that this is not what the article says. It says that they stopped scanning Gmail for ads, but does not say they stopped scanning email for non-ad purposes.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by chippy on Friday June 23, 2017 @01:38PM (#14621061)

To be more accurate the article says they stopped scanning for ads that appear inside gmail. Whether they still scan emails in the free gmail for use outside gmail is unknown, but I may be being pedantic...

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by joshuamorton on Friday June 23, 2017 @01:46PM (#14621128)

(disclosure, I work on gmail, although nothing related to ads)

I can't find a citation, but I'm fairly confident that that's never been the case. Ad targeting from emails has always been siloed to within gmail. To quote the post:

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

That's pretty unequivocal.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by chippy on Saturday June 24, 2017 @05:56AM (#14625058)

Thanks!

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by kinkrtyavimoodh on Friday June 23, 2017 @01:30PM (#14620969)

Any spam filtering implies scanning right? (Unless the filtering is purely on basis of headers and other non-message-body info)

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by fishywang on Friday June 23, 2017 @01:44PM (#14621118)

It depends on whether you consider mail headers part of the email. I personally think scanning mail headers still counts as scanning email.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by secabeen on Friday June 23, 2017 @01:35PM (#14621035)

Well yeah. They have to scan content for you to effectively search your own email, which is one of their flagship features.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by dsp1234 on Friday June 23, 2017 @04:09PM (#14622344)

I can't edit the above, but the context I meant was non-ad, non-email purposes.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by eatbitseveryday on Friday June 23, 2017 @01:16PM (#14620864)

I agree - I read the article. But having many sources to feed the ads probably made the decision to announce universally that emails are no longer going to be scanned easier to do in the first place.

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