Updated Google privacy policy opens door to using Gmail content for ad personalization
Ars Technica AI · rss · 2026-10-24
Per Ars Technica, a Google privacy policy update issued October 16 quietly dismantles a long-standing firewall. The ad personalization section used to state plainly: "We don't show you personalized ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail, or Photos." That language has been replaced with more equivocal wording.
The new phrasing opens the door to using data from Gmail and Photos for ads when it's "shared with other Google services" — and Google happens to have a mechanism for exactly that: Personal Intelligence, released in early 2026, lets users hand data from multiple apps to Google AI products for better answers, now doubling as a potential conduit for sensitive data into the ad system. Android Authority first spotted the change.
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