Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads
- The move is designed to ease concerns of enterprise customers
- Diane Greene pushes ad change to chase Microsoft in enterprise
A visitor passes a sign featuring Google Inc.'s logo inside their new U.K. headquarters at Six St Pancras Square in London, U.K., on Tuesday, June 21, 2016. The owner of the world's largest search engine built its new U.K. headquarters on 2.4 acres (1 hectare) of land that's part of a larger development by King's Cross Central LP near the Eurostar rail link to mainland Europe.
Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/BloombergGoogle is stopping one of the most controversial advertising formats: ads inside Gmail that scan users’ email contents. The decision didn’t come from Google’s ad team, but from its cloud unit, which is angling to sign up more corporate customers.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud sells a package of office software, called G Suite, that competes with market leader Microsoft Corp. Paying Gmail users never received the email-scanning ads like the free version of the program, but some business customers were confused by the distinction and its privacy implications, said Diane Greene, Google’s senior vice president of cloud. “What we’re going to do is make it unambiguous,” she said.