Google can now use connected Photos data for ads

Google has changed its privacy policy so that Google Photos, Gmail and Drive data you connect to its AI features can be used for ads. The revision took effect on 16 October and was first spotted by Android Authority; over the last week of October it was picked up by PetaPixel (27 October), TechPP (26 October), The Hacker News and The Next Web, among many others. The promise not to personalise ads from your photos still stands, with one new condition attached.

What the new sentence says

For years Google's policy has said it does not use the content of Gmail, Drive or Photos to personalise ads. The revised text keeps that line and adds an exception: "unless you choose to make data from these services available to other Google services that support personalized ads."

The service that makes this matter is Personal Intelligence, Google's opt-in feature that lets AI Mode in Search and Gemini draw on your own accounts. Connect Photos to it and you can ask about a trip and get an answer built from your own pictures. Under the new wording, the same connected data can also inform which ads you are shown.

Reporting agrees on the limits. This is not Google scanning every photo library by default: nothing changes for anyone who never connects these apps, Google says advertisers get no access to your inbox or your pictures, and the policy still describes the data as not used for ads unless you make it available. Coverage also points to two switches that undo it: disconnecting Gmail, Photos and Drive from Personal Intelligence in your Google Account, and turning off personalised ads in My Ad Center.

Why it drew so much attention

On one side, the change is narrow and disclosed. It applies to people who have chosen an AI feature, and a company that offers a free assistant built on your data has always been likely to want that data to pay for itself. Several outlets were careful to say the change "could" affect ads rather than that it already does.

On the other side, the complaint is less about this one sentence than about how consent now works. You connect your photo library to get a better answer to a question. The ad use rides along with that choice rather than being asked for on its own, and it lives in a policy update most people will never read. Headlines across the coverage settled on the word "quietly" for that reason.

There is also the nature of the material. A photo library is not a search history. It holds the faces of your children, your parents' house, the hospital room, the receipts you photographed for a claim. Whatever is or is not done with it, people feel the difference between a service that stores their pictures and one that reads them.

What it means for the pictures you keep

The useful lesson here is not "leave Google Photos". Cloud backup is how most families stop losing pictures when a phone breaks, and that still matters more than almost anything else on this page. The lesson is to notice the moment you hand your pictures to a new purpose.

Three such moments are worth watching. The first is connecting a photo library to an assistant: a convenience that now carries ad terms as well. The second is uploading a picture anywhere, because a file from a phone often carries more than the image. Camera metadata (EXIF) can include the time, the device and, if location was on, where it was taken. The browser Brave is reported by PiunikaWeb to have started stripping that metadata from images on upload and download in its desktop release of 28 October, work tracked in the project's own issue list. The third is making something from your pictures: an album, a book, a card. Ask where the photographs go while you do.

Where Atlas stands

Atlas makes a magazine issue from up to ten photographs and your own words, and it was built so that your photographs stay in your browser while you do. When you add pictures on the desk, they are held as files in the page, laid out and measured there, and the PDF comes out of your own browser's print dialog. Photos and story text are never stored, and they leave the browser only when you choose one of the tools that says so.

The one that sends photographs is the editor, which designs an issue for you. Its panel says plainly what happens: "Small previews of your photographs and your words are sent to an AI provider for this, and not kept." Those previews are redrawn in your browser at 512 pixels on the long side and saved as a fresh JPEG, so they carry the picture and not the original file. The editor needs an account, and Wanderer, the free plan, has two designs a month.

The other is Save & share, for when you want a link. What it stores is the finished pages, drawn as pictures and sealed in your browser with a key that travels after the # in the link, a part of the address browsers never send to a server. Your original photographs go up only if you also tick Allow editing later, and then as smaller copies sealed with the same key. As the panel puts it, when you don't keep the key on your account, "Nobody else can open it — not even us."

And Atlas has nothing to sell around your pictures. Its privacy page says it sets no advertising or tracking cookies.

If you would rather not use AI at all, you don't have to. The ready-made pages in Atlas Studio are finished designs you fill by hand, as described in our spotlight on them.

What to do this week

Spend ten minutes on your own settings. Open your Google Account, find Personal Intelligence and the apps connected to it, and decide whether Photos belongs there. Look at My Ad Center while you are in. On your phone, check whether your camera saves location, and turn it off if you never use it.

Then do the thing the photographs are for. Pick ten pictures from one day this year, a wedding function, a Diwali evening, a long drive, and write a page about it while you still remember the details. Set it as an issue on the desk and keep the PDF somewhere that is yours. A file on your own drive answers to nobody's policy update.