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by joshuamorton 2437 days ago
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.

1 comments

Gmail knows about more than flights. They know everything you've bought and received an email receipt for: https://mail.google.com/mail/mu/mp/878/#tl/search/Category%3...

There's nothing in their privacy policy that explicitly states they don't use that info for ad targeting that I can see.

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]

[0]: https://support.google.com/googlecloud/answer/6056650, under "Does Google use my organization’s data in G Suite services or Cloud Platform for advertising purposes?"

[1]: https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-tractio....

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.

See my edit.
Neither is policy. One is a help doc, the other a blog post. They should probably codify it into their privacy policy.
Edit: https://safety.google/privacy/ads-and-data/ See "Gmail" at the bottom:

"Google does not use keywords or messages in your inbox to show you ads. Nobody reads your email in order to show you ads."

Google's privacy policies are written to be understandable by lay-people. Describing the specific breakdowns of what things they aren't doing can be intimidating or scary. So they don't. But the information you care about is still there, unless you're assuming some weird level of linguistic runaround.