Google settles lawsuit over its ad-targeting practices in Gmail

Google will now scan your emails for information relevant to advertising just a bit slower thanks to a settlement of a case pending in a Northern California district court. The system will now scan those emails after they’re available in the recipient’s Gmail mailbox, in contrast to Google’s prior practice, where the email was scanned during the delivery process.Since each email message is scanned to deliver more relevant ads, the process meant that non-Gmail accounts were indirectly being cataloged as well. The plaintiffs in the case, which was styled Matera vs. Google, argued that this was a violation of both the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the California Information Privacy Act, calling the strategy “the twenty-first-century equivalent of AT&T eavesdropping on each of its customers’ phone conversations, or of the postal service taking information from private correspondence.”