But let's not be naive: if Google will stop reading our emails in order to send us personalized ads, that's because it doesn't really need to. People share just enough outside their email environment for Google to do its thing. Another sign of which those worrying about privacy should be aware.
The only revenue being sacrificed is being able to deliver less contextual ads in gmail, they still know a lot about you so they'll still be targeted ads so their sacrificing marginal contextual targeting vs peace of mind in a large corporate market which are hesitant to use Google's G-Suite products because of their concerns that their emails are being scanned.
Google is smart, if they're doing this it's because they've calculated the increase potential in G-Suite revenue is more than the marginal loss in less contextually specific ads in gmail. Other factors that play a role in the decision is better branding in that Google is no longer spying in your private conversations to sell you targeted ads and the mitigation of potential lawsuits.
Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail AdsYour mileage might vary but for me inbox is by far the most productive way to handle my e-mail.
They are making billions from ads, just look their annual report.
In other words, how much is it worth to fight the perception that gmail is somehow less secure than office 365 because ads (others have pointed out Google apps for business users don't see ads in their work gmail).
I somehow doubt that gmail ads are worth even remotely close to $120 (12 months * $10 per month) per user per year.
In other news: How much is a user worth per year to Google? Assuming not all users are the same, is there a way to predict his much revenue a user can bring for Google?
People still use email for all kinds of business, of course. But their day-to-day personal activities, the kind that marketers care about ("I've taken up kayaking!", "I'm pregnant!") don't usually show up in emails any more, they get posted on social media.
Speak for yourself, I don't like to imagine that at all.
As it is, they're presumably still reading our gdocs, address books, calendars, hangouts, search histories and broswing histories, and geolocations/third party app usage for all the android users. Email data is white noise compared to this.
I'd wonder how IT could be so stupid to put up with this if Microsoft hadn't also made pervasive surveillance mandatory.
So you haven't worked in an industry where you had that data and tried it then? In my experience you are completely, utterly wrong.
That's certainly the bullshit narrative Google wants you to believe.
I disagree with the TOS but we use their services at work. What am I supposed to do? Quit my job?
Even with ads blocked and cookies disabled, so much JavaScript is served by them, they can infer my browsing habits anyway, and I can't count the number of times I've had to rip 8.8.8.8 out of DNS settings in the last year.
How exactly does this constitute a choice to share my private information with them, and what thing that I want am I getting in exchange, exactly?
And so it goes. Coupled with AI and the amount of data they are able to feed into the AI engines, I am guessing this won't regress their ad targeting.
They have also managed to supplant it with other avenues. Google Travel, Google Calendar and other apps have explicit permission to read your email, Google serves email images off their own servers which gives them a tracking beacon and behavioural data across cohorts. All this adds a level of indirection but still gives them access to behavioural data and user intent.
Based on the numbers in the article like doubling their "large business" user base in the past year, I think Diane Greene will lead them to generating huge revenue in the Enterprise sector. Also, I think freemium versions of Google software, directed at consumers, will be increasingly popular in the future.
Microsoft's "premium" push is actually moving toward more invasive surveillance.
They've been ramping up the marketing doublespeak about their "telemetry" in the last 12 months. Maybe that is a sign they'll back off sometime soon, but so far, it's "Full steam ahead, users be damned."
I suspect the scanning of emails hasn't yielded the personalization once hoped. And the bad publicity outweighs any future potential.
I vaguely remember Google had to put their foot down to disallow such use, that's how popular those filesystems became.
One of the most powerful advantages of Gmail vs the competition is it's superbly powerful spam filtering and search features - I doubt it's worth losing that powerful image in order to get a few more users to pay up.
Just like the biggest advantage and product feature ProtonMail has is privacy and encryption - it would be a bad product decision to remove encryption from all free customers in order to get them to pay up.
The alternative is to offer a fully functional free* model that focuses on your strength, and charge customers for extra - extremely useful and important, but non product essential - features.
* Some would argue that Google's model is not free, as you are paying for it with your data, but that is a different discussion and outside the scope here.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-privacy-idUSKBN14U1FL https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/10/whatsapp-... http://www.kemplittle.com/site/articles/kl_bytes/the-draft-e...