Google is finally putting an end to one of its most controversial ad practices, the one that involved scanning emails of its users. Beginning from "later this year", Google will no longer scan user emails to customize the ads that are displayed to them. This format must have been very efficient and "successful", as the company has been scanning all messages since 2014.
The announcement came from Diane Greene, Senior Vice President of Google Cloud. In a blog post, Greene wrote about G Suite, the commercial version of Gmail. Users that paid for Gmail were never bothered with advertisements that were personalized through the contents of their emails. However, since consumer-Gmail did do so, some business customers were confused by the potential privacy breach. This confusion prompted Google to adapt other personalization options such as giving them settings to choose from. Presumably, Google was afraid that these customers could turn over to Microsoft or other companies that offer similar products.
To get things straight, Gmail will still display ads as prompted messages. The only thing that will change (when the changes are put into place, "later this year") is the source of personalizing information. Google now plans to pull this valuable information from sources like YouTube, Search and other Google services. In a nutshell, we will still get personalized ads but in a more sophisticated way that no longer explicitly scans the contents of our emails. According to Greene, Google will keep privacy and security paramount. Users can control the information they share with Google at myaccount.google.com.
Alongside the announcement, Greene outlined the importance of the G Suite. The paid Google product is used by over 3 million companies and has more than doubled its user base in the past year. Google does not share much information about the workings of its cloud division, so we can only assume that G Suite is one of the most important paid products.
Source: Google
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