Google's privacy policy now lets Gmail, Drive, and Photos data target ads when you share it with AI features
- Google amended its privacy policy on October 16 to add an exception to its promise not to use Drive, Gmail, or Google Photos for personalized ads: it now applies "unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads."
- The exception covers users who connected those services to AI Mode and other Search tools through Google's Personal Intelligence feature, which lets the tools draw on personal content to give better responses and recommendations.
- Google says advertisers never get the Drive, Gmail, or Photos content itself, nor identifying details like name and email, and that ads are not targeted on sensitive categories such as race, sexual orientation, religion, or health.
- Android Authority spotted the change. The earlier policy stated flatly that Google would not use those services' data for personalized ads, with no exception clause.
Hacker News 의견들
I dropped Google years ago once it was obvious this kind of thing was coming. Never looked back.
Google has always done this, it's the entire reason Gmail exists. They're just saying it out loud now.
That's not true and the cynicism doesn't help anyone. They did use Gmail that way, then they stopped, and that was a real privacy win. Going back on it now is bad news, not business as usual.
Those years of unlimited free photo storage weren't generosity. That was all training data.
If regulators actually did their job Google would have been fined out of existence by now. The ugly part is you can find people by email content and serve them ads pushing a scam product or malware.
Read the actual wording before panicking. It only kicks in if you choose to make that data available to other Google services. That's narrower than the headline suggests, and inference isn't free, nobody pays with money anymore, they pay with attention.
Boiling the frog. 'Choose to' means not opting out of a pile of toggles, and declining to opt out counts as choosing.
On my last Android phone the official Google apps nagged constantly to enable sharing across the ecosystem, full of dark patterns. If you say no, features quietly break until you give in.
You literally can't do anything useful with Gemini as an Assistant replacement without granting it access to everything, it can't even tell you the weather otherwise. If you use Gemini at all today, it's already authorized to use your photos to serve ads.
This is whitewashing. How do you actually not make the data available? Which services count as supporting personalized ads, all of them? What are the steps, and how would we even tell?
I think it's the opposite of narrow. Tying basic integrations to the controversial stuff is their playbook. Making calendar entries from flight confirmations is on by default and sits under that same sharing toggle.
They won't target race, religion, or health, so that's the line they're drawing. Very comforting.
Doesn't matter much, I don't see ads anymore. I even strip them out of the podcasts I listen to.
Advertising is the root of it all. It drives overconsumption, targets kids, makes everything more expensive, and the product with the biggest budget wins instead of the better one.