Recently,Google has announced to the end of its policy of scanning user emails for targeted advertising purposes -- a controversial practice that raise privacy advocates and spurred legal challenges.
Gmail has highest 1.2Billion user all over the world.
Google attributed its decision to gains it has made in the enterprise. Its G Suite business over the past year has more than doubled in size to 3 million paying corporate customers, who are not subject to the scanning process.
"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 email service," said Diane Greene, senior vice president at Google Cloud. "This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize advertizements for other Google products like drive,gmail,g suite etc."
Ads are based on user settings, and users can disable personalization, Greene noted.
G Suite will continue to be ad-free, she said.
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Legal Fight
This is a major step forward for online privacy, said M. Rotenberg, executive director of the EPIC, which has challenged the Google practice in court.
"EPIC opposed Google scanning email from the start and won several significant battles, including the 2014 decision to end scanning of student emails," he told ExamsFreak. "Keep in mind also that Google was scanning the email of non-Gmail users, raised problems under FW law and was the target of lawsuits."
M.R. cited a specific case One case that is pending appeal before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Marquis v. Google, is a class action, Rotenberg noted. It was launched by a resident who alleged his AOL account had been scanned for advertising purposes.
The suit argues that the practice amounts to wiretapping, because
A aggrement was reached late last year in a California class action brought by Daniel Matera and Susan Rashkis, who accused Google of violating federal wiretapping and state privacy laws by scanning non-Gmail accounts for advertising and mony making purposes.
As part of that aggrement, Google agreed to pay US$2.2 million in legal fees, but a federal judge earlier this year rejected the agreement.
Enterprise Concerns
As Google makes further inroads into the cloud business, it recognizes that customers are going to be very wary of anything that threatens their privacy and security when compared against incumbent cloud services providers, noted J.Kaplan, managing director of ThinkStrategies.
"Google has always assumed that its users accept the implicit cost of using its free app," he told TechNewsWorld, which is "that they will be targets of its ads and other search engine marketing mechanisms.
"However, as it tries to build its E-business, Google has recognized it must abandon this tactic to remain competitive with other enterprise and collaboration alternatives, such as Microsoft Office 365," Kaplan said.
It's not likely that the new privacy objective will harming Google's ability to generate revenue, said J McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.
"Google gathers lots of information and data from other sources," he told ExamsFreak, "and already has huge amounts of data on everything, including individuals."
