> If you aren't paying Google, then they are harvesting your attention, activities, preferences, and future spending habits to eventually sell to the highest bidder.
Google stopped scanning Gmail.com users' inboxes in 2017[0] and Workspace in general has a guarantee that they don't use any core service data[1] for their advertising business[2]:
> Google will only access or use Customer Data to provide the Services and TSS to Customer or as otherwise instructed by Customer. Without limiting the generality of the preceding sentence, Google will not process Customer Data for Advertising purposes or serve Advertising in the Services. Google has implemented and will maintain administrative, physical, and technical safeguards to protect Customer Data, as further described in the Data Processing Amendment.
"Google stopped scanning Gmail.com users' inboxes in 2017"
Actually, what the Guardian article says is that Google claims that:
"Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalisation after this change."
That doesn't mean they don't scan/read/use the contents of Gmail users' mailboxes completely. It just means they claim they don't do it for ads personalization.
So nothing in that announcement prevents them from doing this for other reasons.
There's also plenty of other juicy data that Google gets on you.. such as who you communicate with and know (gotten through Gmail and many other means), and things they can infer about you, which isn't affected by this announcement at all.
IMO this is in the context of ad personalization so it's still valid, and it illustrates that they scan email for Workspace as well to provide useful features (like the 'designed to prevent you from threats' point on this marketing page[0])
That "guarantee" is of no use unless you can prove it (which you can't from the outside - so much data goes into ad targeting that it's impossible to definitely prove which bit of data was used to target a given ad).
They've also proven their bad faith with their GDPR consent flow that's not actually compliant with the regulation (there should be a big "decline" button as easy to use as the "accept" button).
> Google will only access or use Customer Data to provide the Services and TSS to Customer or as otherwise instructed by Customer. Without limiting the generality of the preceding sentence, Google will not process Customer Data for Advertising purposes or serve Advertising in the Services. Google has implemented and will maintain administrative, physical, and technical safeguards to protect Customer Data, as further described in the Data Processing Amendment.
0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/26/google-wi...
1: https://workspace.google.com/terms/user_features.html
2: https://workspace.google.com/terms/premier_terms.html#:~:tex....