Google Quits Scanning Email, Permanently Kills Ads For Apps for Education Customers

Today, we’re taking additional steps to enhance the educational experience for Apps for Education customers:

  • We’ve permanently removed the “enable/disable” toggle for ads in the Apps for Education Administrator console. This means ads in Apps for Education services are turned off and administrators no longer have the option or ability to turn ads in these services on.
  • We’ve permanently removed all ads scanning in Gmail for Apps for Education, which means Google cannot collect or use student data in Apps for Education services for advertising purposes.

via Official Google Enterprise Blog: Protecting Students with Google Apps for Education.

Good news! This is especially important for K-12 edu users. No more scanning of email by Google really will help support privacy issues surrounding use of Gmail in education. Personally I’m happy they won’t be scanning at least one of my email accounts.

Why Email Is A Fail #768

One of the failings of email is the ease with which topics get stolen. The subject drift in email threads is often stunning. And it then clouds the original questions which don’t get answered.

I understand why this happens. A question or statement in a message triggers a thought that is somehow related to the topic so a reply is fired into the thread.

And boom!

Before you know it an email thread has gone from A to F without getting the discussion needed around A. Then someone needs to step up and redirect back to A. But what about C? That was a good topic too, but it’s lost now.

There must be a better solution. Maybe a threaded forum that made it easy to branch the topic to another discussion would help. Anything would be better than my email folders.