Google kept its promise about Gmail and ads. Then it added eighteen words.

Since July 2021 Google's privacy policy carried a flat sentence: "We don't show you personalized ads based on your content from Drive, Gmail, or Photos." On 16 October that sentence grew a tail. It now ends "unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads."

The reason is a feature called Personal Intelligence, which arrived in January and lets Google Search, mainly its AI Mode, along with the Gemini app, read your Gmail, Calendar and Photos so the answers come back tailored to you. The policy now also says Search "may process some of the data that you allow Search to access to personalize content, including ads". So the information does not flow anywhere by itself. Connecting Gmail is the switch, and once it is on, what is in there can inform what you are sold. Personal Intelligence is not offered in the UK, the European Economic Area or Switzerland, so a lot of readers are outside this entirely.

If you are inside it, two separate settings are worth ten minutes. The first is which apps are connected to Personal Intelligence, which you can unplug individually. The second is ad personalisation itself, at My Ad Center and at google.com/search-personalization. They are independent controls, and Google has not built a single switch that covers the pairing, so turning one off does not quietly handle the other.

None of this is a breach or a leak. It is a trade that got slightly broader without anybody being asked again, which is the usual shape of these things. Tendvane's Privacy and accounts check is the local version of the same audit: what your PC is sharing, and which of your accounts have shown up in known leaks.