Google will no longer read your emails for Gmail ads

Here is a comforting piece of news, Bloomberg is reporting that Google has decided to cease reading your emails to determine what ads to show you in Gmail. While I’m all for this policy change, it isn’t happening because Google finally decided it was a bit too invasive to read your email–no it’s happening because Google wants to lure corporate customer’s away from Microsoft Office and towards G Suite.

“Google is stopping one of the most controversial advertising formats: ads inside Gmail that scan users’ email contents. 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 Inc.’s Google Cloud sells a package of office software, called G Suite, that competes with market leader Microsoft Corp. 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.”

That being said, you will still see ads in Gmail, however, instead of them being targeted based on the email’s contents, they will be targeted based on other data points Google has on you, including your Google search and YouTube history (as is the case with pretty much all Google ads).

(via Bloomberg.)