[cmsimike]

Gmail has no incentive to create anything secure or private because that would prevent them from going through your email to show ads. [This is wrong]

Update! Gmail changed this behavior a while ago. Went under my radar: https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-email...

Thanks!

[lloydde]

“We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.”

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en

[cmsimike]

You're absolutely right. Turns out they changed this behavior in 2017. Thanks for making me look into it.

[lloydde]

You’re welcome. I found it fascinating at the time of the change, and still do, that email is sacred, but all other activity is open for manipation-based-advertising.

[wibble10]

If they don’t scrape your email how is this page generated then?

https://myaccount.google.com/purchases

[jvolkman]

Nobody said the emails aren't scanned; they're just not used as context for ads. Obviously they're scanned, otherwise spam filtering wouldn't be possible.

[wibble10]

I think there’s a difference between scanning all incoming mail for spam and keeping a details list of my purchase history by scanning my inbox for receipts somehow... If they aren’t using this data for context ads it must be being used for something else otherwise why would they do it?

[franzunix]

good question

[wool_gather]

This can be parsed two different ways, though:

We will not scan your messages. (One possible reason we would have done this would be for advertising.)

vs.

We will not use the scans we perform on your messages to make advertising decisions.

I'm honestly not sure which it is (although I also don't care much personally since I don't use Gmail).

[lloydde]

We know that all email providers scan our email. This is considered necessary to reduce spam.