Google to stop scanning youth accounts in education suite

Google will no longer scan millions of children's emails collected using a suite of products tailored for schools in order to better target ads.

The changes, announced Wednesday, revise some of the policies governing Google's "Apps for Education" products.

Among other things, Google says it will no longer scan texts of emails sent through Apps for Education for clues about students' interests. The scanning would give the company a better idea about what kinds of ads to show them.

While Google doesn’t charge for its popular email service, Gmail, the company scans users’ emails for data it can sell to advertisers. The practice is not illegal.

Google is also removing an option that allowed school administrators to show Gmail ads when students were using Apps for Education. The company said it has always disabled ads on education products by default unless an administrator changed the setting, but took it a step further by removing the option to switch them on or off altogether.

More than 30 million students, teachers and administrators use the Apps for Education suite.

Al Jazeera and The Associated Press