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Comment by lloydde | Hacker News Reader

“We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.”

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en

You're absolutely right. Turns out they changed this behavior in 2017. Thanks for making me look into it.

You’re welcome. I found it fascinating at the time of the change, and still do, that email is sacred, but all other activity is open for manipation-based-advertising.

If they don’t scrape your email how is this page generated then?

https://myaccount.google.com/purchases

good question

Nobody said the emails aren't scanned; they're just not used as context for ads. Obviously they're scanned, otherwise spam filtering wouldn't be possible.

I think there’s a difference between scanning all incoming mail for spam and keeping a details list of my purchase history by scanning my inbox for receipts somehow... If they aren’t using this data for context ads it must be being used for something else otherwise why would they do it?

It's used for Assistant

The list of purchases is the feature.

The critical words in the statement are not "We will not scan or read your Gmail messages"; they are "to show you ads."

In other words, they reserve the right to scan or read your Gmail for any purpose other than showing you ads. So they can still read your email for things like creating that purchases list, as well as a myriad of other tasks. As long as that task doesn't involve showing you an ad, your Gmail is wide open to them.

This can be parsed two different ways, though:

We will not scan your messages. (One possible reason we would have done this would be for advertising.)

vs.

We will not use the scans we perform on your messages to make advertising decisions.

I'm honestly not sure which it is (although I also don't care much personally since I don't use Gmail).

We know that all email providers scan our email. This is considered necessary to reduce spam.

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