Does Google Read Email Attachments in Gmail for AdSense Ads ?
Google spiders read your email text to determine relevant AdSense ads that are displayed next to the content of your Gmail messages.
But do these spiders read email attachments as well for serving targeted ads in Gmail ?
I recently had an email exchange with a Dell Support person and he sent me an invoice for some Dell Desktop as a PDF attachment. When I opened this email message, GMail showed ads for the Tamil version of AOL and they were written in Tamil language.
I scanned that email conversation again and everything was written in English. In fact there were no words or phrases in the email message that could possibly trigger an AdSense ad in Tamil language.
Then I opened the PDF attachment and it contained the address of Dell Office which is based somewhere in Tamil Nadu.
Maybe this particular line in the email attachment triggered the above ad in Gmail.
There are no privacy concerns here because no human beings are reading your Gmail email but it would still be nice to know if email attachments are taken into account by Google when determining AdSense ads.
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Yes….
We have seen ads based on the content in the attachment. Most of the mails to our office are of the
“Dear Sir, Please see the attachment” kind only and the Google Ads seem to target the attachment
this is an excellent catch.. cif this be the case then ALL attachments are scanned for AD targetting.. and this also means that a cache /copy of the attachhment is kept someplace..
the next question is how safe is it being kept and what else is google doing with this information ??
IT surmounts to industrial esponiage in a sutble way
There can be one more possibility, the IP from where the email was generated…
Speaking of tracking IP numbers, do you think Google can track my IP if I visit a site with AdSense but DON’T click any of the ads? That seems like it would be a simple javascript function. If so, then Google would have a good idea of what sites I visited, what ads I clicked, and could then serve me ads based NOT on the context of the site I’m visiting, but on Google’s assessment of what I’m interested in. Tell me I’m being paranoid!