Google started testing ads in AI Mode for people who opt to link their Google apps to Personal Intelligence, referencing summaries, excerpts and inferences from these sources to personalize their experience and ads “so they are even more helpful for you.”
Google has been running ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode for over a year, so the ads themselves aren’t new, but it had originally promised to keep users who connect their apps ad-free. Now it just promises that it won’t show personalized ads based on sensitive categories and that advertisers won’t get access to anyone’s connected apps. The privacy goalpost keeps moving.
What’s funny / scary / disturbing is that Google says that “ads will not be based directly on your Gmail inbox or your Google Photos library” — just from the “summaries” and “excerpts” derived from those sources.
So what’s the difference?
For you or Google, there really is no difference. Google AI reads your e-mails and views your photos, creates a summary of its findings, and then personalizes your ads based on that summary. If Morty Smith were here, he’d say, “That just sounds like privacy invasion with extra steps!”
If I start e-mailing my parents to plan our upcoming trip to Miami, and Google reads those e-mails and creates a summary that says, “Paul is planning a trip to Miami” — it’s arrived at the information either way. In fact, I don’t really see how that “extra step” is any different from how it has summarized users’ search and browsing histories for years and served ads based on it. Google isn’t referencing 20,000+ search queries every time it serves an ad to you. It’s often just referencing the persona it has built for you based on those queries.
Remember back in 2017 when Google made a big show of promising that Gmail content “will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization”? Well, the company quietly updated that blog post on October 16 with a note saying that data from connected apps may now be used to show you ads. It appears that old habits are hard to break.
What are your thoughts on Google serving ads based on your Gmail and Photos? Join the conversation on LinkedIn.
