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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html
Google plans to abandon its longstanding practice of scanning user email in its Gmail service to serve targeted advertising.
Google said it does not scan the email of paying corporate customers of its G Suite of services, but it made the policy change — announced in a company blog post on Friday — on its free consumer version to eliminate confusion and create one uniform policy toward Gmail.
As it builds its Google Cloud business for selling internet infrastructure and services to corporate customers, Google is trying to ease concerns that it will use data from corporate customers to help its mainstay advertising business.
Google said it plans to carry out the changes to the Gmail ad policy "later this year." It will continue to scan Gmail to screen for potential spam or phishing attacks as well as offering suggestions for automated replies to email.
(Score: 2) by termigator on Sunday June 25 2017, @06:49PM
If you have a browser that allows you to define custom CSS for sites, you can hide the ads in the web interface.
I think the decision by Google is to simplify the maintenance of the gmail service: reducing variability in the service between free and paying customers. Since many people use apps to access gmail, which do not show ads, it likely costs more to maintain the differences in the service than what is obtained from ad revenue.