“Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change,” Greene said. “This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalise ads for other Google products. Ads shown are based on users’ settings. Users can change those settings at any time, including disabling ads personalization.”

Privacy activists have long complained that the scanning of email contents amounts to unwarranted “eavesdropping” on users.

The internet giant earlier this year reached a settlement in a class action lawsuit in the matter, but a federal judge rejected the deal as inadequate.

US District Judge Lucy Koh ruled in March that the settlement was difficult to understand and “does not clearly disclose the fact that Google intercepts, scans and analyses the contents of emails sent by non-Gmail users to Gmail users for the purposes of creating user profiles of the Gmail users to create targeted advertising.”

Danny Sullivan, founding editor of the online blog Search Engine Land, called the move a “big change” for Gmail, noting that the scanning of email contents “has been the biggest hit against the services since it began.”

But Sullivan wrote on Twitter: “On the other hand, does it reassure consumers to know that Google has better info now about how to target them than by reading their emails?”