Google adds an exception to its promise not to target ads with Gmail, Drive and Photos content

Google changed its privacy policy on 16 October 2026. Until then, the section on ads said: “We don’t show you personalized ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail, or Photos.” The new version keeps that sentence and adds a condition: “unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads.”

The mechanism is Personal Intelligence, which lets Google Search and Gemini read a user’s Gmail, Drive and Google Photos to personalise their answers. The updated policy says Search “may process some of the data that you allow Search to access to personalize content, including ads.” Android Authority spotted the change, and The Verge and Ars Technica reported it on 23 October. Google says advertisers do not receive the content or details such as a name or email address, and that sensitive categories such as health and religion stay excluded. Users can disconnect apps in Google’s Search personalisation settings.

For readers in Europe the immediate effect is small. When Google widened Personal Intelligence in April, it left out the European Economic Area, Switzerland and the UK, and we found no report of a European launch since. The privacy policy is one global document, though, and a promise that used to have no exceptions now has one.

The European services listed here against those three products work on a different model. Proton Mail, Tuta Mail, mailbox.org Mail and the newly added Infomaniak Mail carry no advertising at all. For photos, Proton Drive encrypts the whole library end to end, so Proton cannot see it, and pCloud Drive sells face and object search on its paid plans. We have added Google Photos as an incumbent, with both listed against it.