Google has changed its privacy policy so that data from Drive, Gmail and Google Photos can be used for personalized ads, but only if you connect those services to its AI features.
The previous policy said Google would not use content from those three services for ad personalization, full stop. As of October 16, the text adds a condition: the promise holds "unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads." In practice, that covers users who link Drive, Gmail or Photos to AI Mode and other Search tools.
The key word is "choose." Google is framing this as an opt-in, and the old blanket pledge still applies to anyone who never connects their accounts. That is a real distinction. It is also a narrower one than it sounds, because the exception points to "other Google services that support personalized ads," a category the policy language does not limit to a short list. Search is where Google earns most of its money, so a Search feature fed by your inbox sits very close to an ad system.
The change fits a pattern across the industry. AI assistants work better the more they know about you, and companies that sell advertising have an obvious interest in what that knowledge reveals. Meta has already moved toward using AI chat interactions to shape the ads people see. Google's version starts from a different place, a decades-old promise about email and photos, which makes the edit to that promise more notable than the feature itself.
What remains unclear is how visible the trade-off will be at the moment of connection. A policy footnote and a clear consent screen are very different things, and users will mostly meet the second.