Google to Stop Reading Users' Emails to Target Ads
June 23 2017 - 3:15PM
Dow Jones News
By Jack Nicas
Google said its computers will soon stop reading the emails of
its Gmail users to personalize their ads, a move that addresses a
longstanding privacy concern about a product that is central to its
growing corporate-services business.
The core unit of Alphabet Inc. has mined users' emails for
personal data to serve them more relevant ads since it launched
Gmail in 2004, which almost immediately sparked privacy
concerns.
On Friday, the company said it would stop the practice later
this year to align its free Gmail service with its corporate
offering. Corporate Gmail already doesn't mine emails for
information, but Google's business model of collecting user data
generally has contributed to concerns about privacy that complicate
its effort to sell more technology to corporations.
Google says that unlike with its free, advertising-supported
services for consumers, it doesn't mine corporate clients' data for
advertising. "Google's (corporate) customers own their data, not
Google," the company said in an online post. Google is betting that
selling online services, including Gmail, to other companies and
hosting firms' data and systems on its computers can one day
surpass the revenue of its massive advertising business, which
brought in nearly $80 billion last year.
Google doesn't report revenue for its so-called cloud business,
but the non-advertising segment that it is part of grew 41% to $10
billion last year. Google is increasing its sales push in that
cloud industry to catch up to market leaders Amazon.com Inc. and
Microsoft Corp.
Even with the change, free Gmail users will still see ads above
their emails, but those ads will just be personalized from the
other data Google collects about the users, including their
location, internet searches and web history.
Still, losing data from email correspondence is likely to weaken
Google's profiles of users, which enable the company to charge
advertisers more to target specific groups of consumers. Google
appears to be betting that reassuring its lucrative corporate
customers that their emails are safe is worth the trade-off.
Write to Jack Nicas at jack.nicas@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 23, 2017 16:00 ET (20:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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