“Any mainstream, consumer-level account is only free in that you don’t pay it with money, but with data,” Fielding says. Like Gmail, Microsoft’s Outlook is embedded in the firm’s ecosystem and integrated with its other services. Other mainstream email providers aren’t much more private. “In Europe, those protections cover email tracking as well, but there hasn’t been much enforcement in this area.” Gmail v other email services “People are aware of cookies because of privacy and data protection law – which states that planting trackers on your device requires your consent, and you have the right to be told about what is happening to your data,” says Fielding. Most people are becoming aware of tracking as they visit websites due to regulation such as the EU’s ePrivacy Directive and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Part of the problem is a lack of regulatory enforcement around email data collection and tracking. Google claims none of the data collected from scanning emails for purchase information, delivery tracking numbers and flight bookings is used for advertising, but as Andy Yen, founder and CEO of secure email service ProtonMail says: “It remains a fact that Google keeps a record of these events and logs them regardless.” “Practically everything you do online will feed back to Google.” “Gmail becomes a window into your entire online life because of how wide and deep their surveillance architecture goes,” Fielding says. But if you carry cookies from other Google services, your activity can be correlated or “fingerprinted” from associated products such as Google Maps and YouTube. Much of the information collected by Gmail and shared with advertisers is metadata – data about data. And it still scans emails to facilitate so-called smart features such as the ability to add holiday bookings or deliveries straight to your calendar, or to autocomplete suggestions.Įvery way you interact with your Gmail account can be monitored, such as the dates and times you email at, who you are talking to, and topics you choose to email about, says Rowenna Fielding, founder of privacy consultancy Miss IG Geek. Gmail is by far the most popular email service, with more than 1.5 billion active users, compared with 400 million using Microsoft Outlook and 225 million signed up to Yahoo Mail.Īlthough Google stopped scanning email content to tailor ads in 2017, last year the company started showing shopping ads in Gmail. More data is used for analytics – in Google’s words, “to build better services” – including purchase history, location, email address, photos and search history. According to the label, those that grant the appropriate permission to the iOS Gmail app can expect Google to share information including their approximate location, user ID – an identifier used to anonymously track them – and data about the ads they have viewed online with advertisers.
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