Google has updated its privacy policy to allow personal information from Gmail, Google Photos, and Drive to potentially be used for targeted advertising, raising new questions about how the company handles users’ private data.
The change, which took effect on October 16, introduces a significant exception to Google’s previous promise that it would not use content from these services to personalize advertisements.
As first spotted by Android Authority, the updated policy specifically affects users who connect their personal information to Google’s AI-powered services, including Search and Gemini.
Since it seems to be tied to Gemini settings, I think they were not able to design gemini integration in a way that separates data used by gemini from gmail and photos. Let’s say if google uses your gemini chats for targeted ads, if gemini mentions your emails, that will already be part of the data being tracked for ads. So, maybe just disable gemini chat history.
Not able to seems less likely than chose not to. Google has plenty of resources to throw at the problem.