Google To Stop Scanning Student Gmail Accounts For Adverts

Google says it will no longer scan student Gmail accounts for advertising purposes amid accusations that the practice violates US privacy laws.

There are more than 40 million students, teachers and administrators with Google accounts linked to the Google Apps for Education (GAE), which provides Google Apps to schools and universities, including the University of Westminster and the University of St Andrews.

The search giant says it has turned off adverts by default on all educational accounts and removed them entirely from secondary and high school accounts last year. However, until recently, the company’s terms of use stated that it could scan accounts for information that could potentially be used for tailored advertising on other sites that use the AdSense platform.

Student Gmail scanning

“Our automated systems analyse your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customised search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection,” read Google’s terms and conditions. “This analysis occurs as the content is sent, received, and when it is stored.”

There is no indication that Google ever did this with GAE accounts, but the practice was highlighted by a lawsuit in California made by students who said they had been required to use Gmail by their university and that the practice violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act that protects educational records.

The search giant has responded by explicitly stating it will not scan educational accounts for advertising purposes, while it will also disable the ‘enable advertising’ switch for administrators.

“We’ve permanently removed all ads scanning in Gmail for Apps for Education, which means Google cannot collect or use student data in Apps for Education services for advertising purposes,” says Bram Bout, Director of Google for Education.

This will also be extended to all Google Apps customers, including businesses and government customers, and the search giant says it will provide an update when the process is complete.

Google’s attitudes towards privacy have come under fire before, with a new policy that allowed it to combine data from all of its services criticised by a number of governments and the European Union when it was introduced in 2012.

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