Google updates privacy policy to permit Personal Intelligence data in ad targeting
A quiet terms revision dismantles the long-standing advertising firewall surrounding Gmail, Drive, and Photos for users opting into Gemini AI features.
Technology news
Google has quietly updated its global privacy policy, introducing legal language that alters the company’s decades-old commitment to keep personal data from Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos entirely quarantined from targeted advertising algorithms.
For years, Google’s ad personalization documentation included explicit guarantees stating that user content stored in core productivity applications would never serve as targeting criteria. However, revisions spotted in the latest policy update now stipulate that when users connect their personal data to cross-service features—such as Google's recently launched Personal Intelligence system—that context may be used to inform sponsored content and commercial suggestions.
Personal Intelligence, rolled out across the Google ecosystem earlier this year, grants Gemini AI permission to scan past correspondence, calendar reservations, and stored documents to provide proactive answers and contextual search summaries. Under the newly modified terms, commercial placements appearing within Gemini-assisted search results and conversational modules may utilize context surfaced by Personal Intelligence integrations.
While Google maintains that automated advertising crawlers do not directly read private email inboxes in the manner phased out in 2017, privacy advocates warn that routing inbox data through conversational AI context layers effectively circumvents that historical protection. Users seeking to preserve strict advertising firewalls must disable Personal Intelligence extensions within their Google account settings.