SAN FRANCISCO: Google plans to abandon its long-standing practice of scanning user email in its Gmail service to serve targeted advertising. As it builds its Google Cloud business for selling internet infrastructure and services to corporate customers, Google is trying to ease concerns that it will use data from corporate customers to help its mainstay advertising business. “This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalise ads for other Google products,” Diane Greene, Google’s senior vice-president in charge of Google Cloud, wrote in the post. “Some of the regular people who use Google services disliked the way their email contents were being used to target ads way back in 2004. Users may now opt out of receiving personalised ads in Gmail, but they may not opt out of email scanning.

Source: Bangkok Post June 24, 2017 03:33 UTC