The sentence right before the one you quoted is

> When you open Gmail, you'll see ads that were selected to show you the most useful and relevant ads. The process of selecting and showing personalized ads in Gmail is fully automated.

They created that page in order to highlight that there are no humans reading your mail, but OP's point that "it allows them insight into people's communication which they can then leverage with search and ad networking to make way more than they could simply selling email services" is still true to this day. It's just that it's all automated.

No, read the next sentences:

> These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.

They don't scan your emails for ads, they use your search history etc for ads.

Fair point, though I think that wording leaves room for interpretation...

Does learning your social graph by looking at email metadata (sender/addressee, location, time) count as "scan[ning] or reading your Gmail messages"? There are a lot of insights you could "skim from the top" if you control an entire communication platform, even if you don't fully dig into the content.

And regardless: to OP's larger point, the reason Google offers services such as Gmail for free isn't mostly because their support cost is low -- it's mostly because these services allow them to collect a large amount of data that is then used for selling targeted ads, far surpassing the amount of money they would earn from offering ad-free services.

Or email headers, which can also tell enough.

All this shows me is that Google pinky promises that they don't do that.

Even if they don't scan the contents of your email bodies, you don't think they know who you are getting emails from, who you are emailing, and a boatload of info about who you do business with and such as a result?

I'm betting they do.

They do scan your emails for Amazon receipts so that they know what you purchase. That's why Amazon changed how they send receipts.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/google-gmail-tracks-purchase...

Google engineers aren't exactly known to be loyal to the company, if Google didn't keep their promises about stuff like this I'm pretty sure it would get leaked quickly.

The language of the "promise" is such that there is a lot of gray area and there is a lot of information contained with an email that is not the "message" of the email.

Do you honestly think they just blindly deliver emails and don't take even a single scrap of data from them for their own benefit? The biggest data aggregator on the planet is just ignoring all of that data?

Ok.

> Do you honestly think they just blindly deliver emails and don't take even a single scrap of data from them for their own benefit? The biggest data aggregator on the planet is just ignoring all of that data?

Yes, here is the official statement:

> Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change. This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for other Google products.

https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...

Edit: The problem with google is that they collect a lot of data they can abuse, not that they are particularly known to abuse data. So the danger is that their policies change while still having your data, then there is nothing you can do.

An interesting question is how Google defines “content”.

I’d imagine Google could build up great profiles based on metadata alone - which domains email you, which you email, etc.