Business Services Cards

Google's mail servers automatically scan emails for multiple purposes, including to filter spam and malware and, prior to June 2017, to add context-sensitive advertisements next to emails. This advertising practice has been significantly criticized by privacy advocates with concerns over unlimited data retention, ease of monitoring by third parties, users of other email providers not having agreed to the policy upon sending emails to Gmail addresses, and the potential for Google to change its policies to further decrease privacy by combining information with other Google data usage. The company has been the subject of lawsuits concerning the issues. Google has stated that email users must "necessarily expect" their emails to be subject to automated processing and claims that the service refrains from displaying ads next to potentially sensitive messages, such as those mentioning race, religion, sexual orientation, health, or financial statements. In June 2017, Google announced the end of the use of contextual Gmail content for advertising purposes, relying instead on data gathered from the use of its other services.