Google stops managing advertising based on the content of messages in Gmail

Since its launch on April 1, 2004, the terms of service of Gmail, Google’s email service, have been perfectly clear: virtually unlimited space, easy and convenient management, good search facility, and completely free of charge in exchange for the company automatically scanning the content of messages to insert personalized advertising.

At the time, the launch of Gmail was deeply disruptive: emails had a limit of two or four megabytes of capacity, were spam factories and generally provided a deeply disappointing user experience … until Google, without prior warning, launched its mail with a gigabyte and spectacularly good spam filter. In exchange for a service so differently good, the company inserted personalized advertising based on the contents of the message: nobody read your email, but an algorithm scanned it and chose an advertisement from a database of advertisers. The option, which at the time was widely criticized as an intrusion of privacy, has been a feature of Gmail since its inception, and the way in which Google tried to fund the service.

Now, after thirteen years, what is undoubtedly the best way to manage email for its 1.2 billion users worldwide, Google has decided to eliminate ads based on the scanning of our emails. The service will continue to contain advertising, but the allocation algorithms will be based on other personal information that the company obtains from its users based on their web searches or the videos they watch on YouTube. The official reason for eliminating this practice, according to the company, appears to be the steady rise in the number of corporate customers paying for the use of Gmail as part of the G Suite, who didn’t receive advertisements, but who might be concerned about their non-corporate accounts.

This is a concern that was never a real obstacle to widespread adoption and never led to the cancellation of the function in all the years the product has been running, which probably indicates that the company was able to verify that the effectiveness of those ads administered according to the content of e-mails had to be extremely low, and therefore made no sense from an economic slant, and could scare off potential corporate customers. On the other hand, the decision also indicates a harmonization in the way in which the different products of the company work, along with an interest in improving perceptions of respect for privacy.

In its more than thirteen years of operation, Gmail has evolved from its initial advantageous position to become one of the best products of its kind, with an increasingly better interface, anti-spam filters that improve day to day and that on very few occasions require rescuing items, and supported by systems designed to improve efficiency and that correspond to the model of: “we ourselves use this product, so we are constantly coming up with ways to improve it.” I have not yet started using the email auto-responses Gmail proposes using machine learning algorithms at the end of each message (Smart Reply), but I can say they make a lot of sense.

For many years, the integral management of my mail, both personal and corporate, has been through Gmail, and my level of satisfaction could not be higher. Now, moreover, there is another reason to use it: the controversial practice of scanning users’ email content so as to provide contextual advertisements is now history.

(En espa?ol aquí)