Your Gmail and Photos can now shape the ads Google shows you

Google quietly rewrote its privacy policy on October 16, adding an exception to a promise it had kept for nearly a decade: personalized ads were never based on content from Drive, Gmail, or Photos. The sentence now ends with a caveat — “unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads.” Android Authority spotted the change on October 23.

The trigger is Personal Intelligence, the feature that lets Gemini and AI Mode in Search read your email, photos, and files to give more tailored answers. Google's own example says Search “may process some of the data that you allow Search to access to personalize content, including ads” — so connecting your inbox to the AI can also connect it to the ad machine.

Google says advertisers never see your emails or photos, get no names or addresses without permission, and won't see ads based on sensitive categories like race, religion, or health. Users can disconnect apps or turn off Personalized Recommendations — but data already piped into Search may linger in search history even after disconnecting.