Google Mail: Google's approach to email

Google Mail Privacy Notice

14 October 2005

The Google Privacy Policy describes how we treat personal information when you use Google's products and services, including information provided when you use Google Mail. In addition, the following describes our privacy practices that are specific to Google Mail.

Personal information

• You need a Google Account to access Google Mail. Google asks for some personal information when you create a Google Account, including your alternative contact information and a password, which is used to protect your account from unauthorised access. A Google Account allows you to access many of our services that require registration.
• Google Mail stores, processes and maintains your messages, contact lists and other data related to your account in order to provide the service to you.
• When you use Google Mail, Google's servers automatically record certain information about your use of Google Mail. Like other web services, Google records information such as account activity (including storage usage, number of log-ins), data displayed or clicked on (including UI elements, ads, links); and other log information (including browser type, IP address, date and time of access, cookie ID and referrer URL).

Uses

• Google maintains and processes your Google Mail account and its contents to provide the Google Mail service to you and to improve our services. The Google Mail service includes relevant advertising and related links based on the IP address, content of messages and other information related to your use of Google Mail.
• Google's computers process the information in your messages for various purposes, including formatting and displaying the information to you, delivering advertisements and related links, preventing unsolicited bulk email (spam), backing up your messages and other purposes relating to offering you Google Mail.
• Google may send you information related to your Google Mail account or other Google services.

Information sharing and onward transfer

• When you send email, Google includes information such as your email address and the email itself as part of that email.
• We provide advertisers only with aggregated non-personal information such as the number of times one of their ads was clicked. We do not sell, rent or otherwise share your personal information with any third parties except in the limited circumstances described in the Google Privacy Policy, such as when we believe we are required to do so by law.

Your choices

• You may change your Google Mail account settings through the Google Mail "settings" section.
• You may organise or delete your messages through your Google Mail account or terminate your account through the Google Account section of Google Mail settings. Such deletions or terminations will take immediate effect in your account view. Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems.
• You may choose to use additional Google Mail features, such as Google Talk. The Google Talk service has its own privacy notice available here.

More information

Google adheres to the US Safe Harbour privacy principles. For more information about the Safe Harbour framework or our registration, see the US Department of Commerce's web site.

Further information about Google Mail is available here.

For more information about our privacy practices, go to the full privacy policy. For questions concerning the product or your account, please take a look at the Google Help page.