The long-standing Google practice of scanning personal Gmail accounts to provide targeted ad is come to an end, company sourced revealed.
The move comes in the wake of a growing scepticism among corporate clients to trust Google with their data and information. This, in spite of the fact that Google only scans personal email and not those of the corporates or students.
This has also led entrepreneurs to shun Google and turn to competitors like Microsoft and Amazon when it comes to avail of its cloud services for their business needs. Now with the change in policy, it is likely to be easier for the Mountain View company to have new takers for its G Suite offering.
Google had long been claiming the email scanning feature is purely voluntary, with users having the option to opt out of it. That however didn’t stop it from being the subject of many a legal attack. From being accused of infringing upon the privacy of its Gmail users, Google has also been sued by non-Gmail users since any mail they send to a Gmail account is also scanned for prospective ad targets.
Google had since stated they are re-tuning their ad policy to stop scanning the accounts of students as well as those of its corporate clients. Of course that was far too little to convince the business houses to using Google’s cloud services with little to no fear of losing control over their sensitive data.
However, the above move could still be the subject of a lot of controversy as Google isn’t stopping scanning the emails altogether. In fact, while it might not be viewing users as a prospective ad target, it will continue to scan user’s mail to serve its other priorities. Those include search indexing, email filtering, spam detection or preventing virus attacks.
This will be on top of the usual Google practice of keeping a tab on all that we do while online via Google or any of its services. As such, all your activities on Chrome or YouTube will be on tap as usual.