In a move driven by its enterprise business operation, Google Inc. said today it will stop scanning messages in its free Gmail service to target ads later this year.

In one of the more controversial aspects of its services, the search giant has scanned Gmail messages to derive data for better targeting of ads. Although Google never scanned messages of paying customers of Google’s G Suite, which includes ad-free email service for businesses, its cloud and enterprise business operation drove the change because businesses often were confused about the policy difference between their corporate Gmail and the free version.

“G Suite’s Gmail is already not used as input for ads personalization, and Google has decided to follow suit later this year in our free consumer Gmail service,” Diane Greene, Google’s senior vice president of cloud, wrote in a blog post today. “Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change. This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for other Google products.”

Greene also took the opportunity in the post to tout Gmail’s success, including 3 million paying customers and a more than doubling of the level of users among large companies in the past year. What’s more, she added, “No other email service protects its users from spam, hacking, and phishing as successfully as Gmail.”

The move ends a practice that also has been fodder for competitors pitching rival services. Microsoft Corp., for one, has long criticized Google for using email content to target ads inside Gmail, even coming up with an ad campaign taking Google to task.

However, the new policy also raises questions about the extent to which data in emails was useful to Google for targeting. “Who else thinks this is at least partly because targeting ads based on email content didn’t prove to be all that effective?” tweeted Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton University assistant professor of computer science.

Moreover, jettisoning the scanning only goes to show how much other data Google has to personalize ads. So while this may be a small victory for privacy advocates, it’s no indication that Google will know much less about its users. And it will continue to run targeted ads on free Gmail accounts, just using other targeting information, such as searches, app usage and website visits. Google allows people to opt out of targeting, if not the actual data collection.

Still, the move points up the rising importance and clout of Greene and Google’s cloud operation, which is in a pitched battle to gain on cloud leaders Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure. This likely won’t tilt the playing field much, but G Suite is already a Trojan horse for Google Cloud. Anything that knocks down an obstacle to use of Google services by businesses also makes Google Cloud Platform more attractive.

Image: Google