Marvelous news from Google at the end of last week. It appears that the Internet giant will no longer be “reading” private Gmail messages to feed its marketing machine.
The announcement was made on the company’s blog by Diane Green, co-founder and for many years head of VMware – in the meanwhile responsible for Google’s Public Cloud division. The plan is to adapt the free consumer version of Gmail to align it in this regard with the commercial and basically marketing-free version of Gmail which forms part of the G Suite set of cloud programs (previously known as Google apps for business).
Advertising will continue to feature in Gmail’s consumer version, but users will be given the opportunity to regulate advertising centrally in the Google account settings, much in the same way as for other Google services. This will provide users with the option, for instance, of switching off the personalization of adverts.
Google’s algorithms will continue to capture the contents of Gmail messages, but only for convenience functions such as “smart reply”. Add-ons will also provide optional functions such as facilitating the payment or creation of bills directly from Gmail.
Competitors such as Microsoft have been criticizing Google sharply since the birth of Gmail in 2004 – in Germany the service was for many years officially known as Google Mail due to brand regulations – for machine-reading the contents of messages for the purposes of personalizing adverts.
But this has hardly put a brake on Gmail’s phenomenal success – according to Google more than 1.2 billion people around the globe are using the service.
The Gmail user figures (and let’s not forget to add the email accounts held by staff at around 3 million companies currently paying for the G Suite) and the continued development the company has announced, clearly underline that email is alive and well, despite the occasional pronouncement of its coming demise, and remains a key and essential channel for electronic communication despite the emergence of new tools.
For wide-ranging reasons, companies naturally have to be more vigilant in their use of email than consumers. The managed cloud service Retarus E-Mail Security is a comprehensive solution for virus and spam free email communication, with extensive functionality including the new Patient Zero Detection®, which retroactively identifies infected messages already in the inbox – and can protect companies from the high costs that are sure to follow an incident. Find out more here or directly from your local Retarus contact person.
