There's a linguistic ambiguity in the part of the op here. What is "mining"?
Is spam filtering mining? Is indexing for search (in Gmail) mining? Is sticking flights on your calendar (and nothing else) mining?
Mining sounds nefarious. Are analysis of emails for the consumer still mining? If they are, and any scanning of emails is bad, why use Gmail? To me at least, it's value is the stuff it does for me.
What part of "We do not scan for advertising purposes in Gmail or other G Suite services. Google does not collect or use data in G Suite services for advertising purposes." is ambiguous?[0]
But that's Gsuite, what about consumer Gmail?
"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"[1]
Where is that? I get redirected to the general Google privacy page from within free Gmail.
I could read that as for only paid Gsuite Gmail, not free Gmail.
As an aside the "what part of..." leader in your reply comes across as rude. The resources you are citing aren't an easy find from within free Gmail. And they aren't in the privacy policy, so what I said remains true.
If this is true how does Google know about my flight details for example? Is it client side Android code or does the information get to the server side in a database decrypted?
Also if Google doesn't need my emails, can you tell me why Google is behind other companies in end-to-end encryption of emails? I'm sure many people would like to have it as a feature (even if it makes searching these emails server side impossible)
Wait... What!? Okay, I'm admittedly ignorant of the technical details of email, but I thought "an email" was just some text (with encoding specified), some internet headers, and maybe a binary blob representing an attachment. Basically, what you see if you "view original" in Gmail. Is there additional meta data that makes up an email? Like, outside of the content "container" part of the email (similar to how image meta data is saved in the EXIF part of a JPEG file, but isn't part of the image itself)? Sorry if I phrased that dumbly.
They referred to such schemas like "FlightReservation"[1] for flights, "EventReservation"[2] commonly used for movie tickets, or "LodgingReservation" used for hotel bookings. The specific supporting website encodes your reservation in these formats inside the confirmation email, and Gmail picks up on that. (IIRC it used to scrape emails for that data, but most of it if not all is done via schemas nowadays)
I believe your statement is incorrect. While it may no longer scan emails for direct ad serving purposes, I believe emails are still scanned for other purposes.
For example, I remember running across a purchase history page a while back that had saved purchase history data based on email confirmations in gmail. IIRC, it was from specific sellers like Amazon going further back than my gmail history, which I periodically purge. I never wanted/enabled this 'feature' and saw no way to disable or delete the purchase history. Maybe this stopped, maybe it didn't, but this game of whack-a-mole with Google has gotten tedious.
Even if we take that post to mean they don't ever look at the content of your email at all (I don't see that), can you tell us who independently verifies that claim? Or should we just trust Google because, hey, a large corporation would never lie to anyone or try to abuse the fine print of a user agreement.
How do you arrive at the list [0] I can view in my account details, that shows all purchases ever made with my gmail account (a feature i cannot disable)?
How else does your employer arrive at this aggregated/filtered dataset? Oneiromancy?
This says nothing about email metadata being used in relation to ads or for uses of content unrelated to ads (e.g., generation of search results).
If I hadn't seen the leaked selfish ledger video [1] I would not look for these nuances in the language.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x-selfish...