Gmail users have often complained that the company scans their emails to serve targeted advertisements. While the company has claimed that it does not do the same for its G Suite corporate Gmail users, all other account holders do have their mail scanned for better ad support and targeting. However, the company has now declared that it will stop scanning emails of every consumer, whether they use the G Suite version or the normal free version of Gmail.
Targeted ad on Gmail
Google announced its decision through its blog post. The practice of the scanning of emails of its Gmail service users is something the company has maintained since the launch of the service.
With the feature, the company was able to search through each email to determine the appropriate ad for every individual user. The service then displayed the targeted ad on the Gmail account.
Why has Google taken this decision?
Even though the company assures that it scans the emails of free-service consumers and not G Suite users, it has still created some confusion in the corporate community. The business sector has been reluctant to trust Google and its cloud service because of the Google's questionable tactics of scanning personal emails. This has led to uncertainty about the security of sensitive data that corporate users may share and store within their Gmail accounts.
Diane Greene, Google’s cloud division head, said that one of her main roles since her appointment back in 2015 was to ensure that more corporate-sector clients subscribed to the G Suite services.
However, the company’s competitors like Amazon and Microsoft are currently dominating the market. With this decision, Google is looking to put the minds of corporate companies at ease by encouraging them to sign up for the G Suite.
Greene assures that the company has never scanned corporate files for Ad Targeting. However, since the practice made the corporate clients unhappy, Google will ditch enforcing the practice even for their free Gmail-using consumers.
This will bring Gmail’s advertising in line with all other Google products.
However, Google also clarified that stopping the scanning of the emails did not mean that users will not see any ads while in their Gmail account. Instead, the ads that people will see will be based upon the browsing and search history in external programs such as Google Chrome and YouTube. Google hopes that with this announcement, any and all concerns regarding security concerns will finally be put to rest.
