As G Suite gains traction in the enterprise, G Suite’s Gmail and consumer Gmail to more closely align

Authored by blog.google and submitted by SirVeza

Google’s G Suite business is gaining enormous traction among enterprise users. G Suite usage has more than doubled in the past year among large business customers. Today, there are more than 3 million paying companies that use G Suite.

G Suite’s Gmail is already not used as input for ads personalization, and Google has decided to follow suit later this year in our free consumer Gmail service. Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change. This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for other Google products. Ads shown are based on users’ settings. Users can change those settings at any time, including disabling ads personalization. G Suite will continue to be ad free.

The value of Gmail is tremendous, both for G Suite users and for users of our free consumer Gmail service. Gmail is the world’s preeminent email provider with more than 1.2 billion users. No other email service protects its users from spam, hacking, and phishing as successfully as Gmail. By indicating possible email responses, Gmail features like Smart Reply make emailing easier, faster and more efficient. Gmail add-ons will enable features like payments and invoicing directly within Gmail, further revolutionizing what can be accomplished in email.

G Suite customers and free consumer Gmail users can remain confident that Google will keep privacy and security paramount as we continue to innovate. As ever, users can control the information they share with Google at myaccount.google.com.

goty_ on June 23rd, 2017 at 18:13 UTC »

Spoon prank guys will be very sad then.

poops_all_berries on June 23rd, 2017 at 16:57 UTC »

I wonder how they arrived at this decision. A few thoughts:

they're making a stand for ethics they're taking preventive legal measures to avoid lawsuits they determined that scanning emails for ad targeting just isn't that profitable. they figured out how to target you using other metrics, like browsing history

tacomonstrous on June 23rd, 2017 at 16:57 UTC »

Whoa, big news. Wonder if they are foreseeing some kind of successful legal challenge in places like the EU.

EDIT: This article has more info on the change. Looks like it was motivated by concerns from enterprise customers.