Advertising Standards Authority agrees Gmail's scanning of email contents to target ads sets it apart from Outlook.com

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

The UK advertising watchdog has cleared a campaign by Microsoft attacking the privacy standards used by Google's Gmail email service.

An ad campaign promoting Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft's rival email service, criticised Gmail for scanning the contents of users' emails for commercial purposes.

The radio ad opens with a sentence of seemingly indecipherable language, the type Microsoft cheekily claims Gmail users will have to adopt if they want to stop Google from scanning their messages to glean personal information to sell to advertisers.

The ad continues: "Pig Latin may be hard to understand, but you probably need it if you use Gmail, because Gmail scans every word of your emails to sell ads."

The Advertising Standards Authority received two complaints challenging whether the ad was misleading because they believed that Microsoft was no better and also also scanned the contents of the all emails.

Microsoft stood by its claim that Outlook.com offered greater privacy options than Gmail, arguing that it only undertook "protective" scanning of emails for viruses and spam.

The ASA said that it was "standard practice" for email providers to scan for viruses and spam, while the criticism of Google's Gmail related to scanning email contents to target ads.

"Because the ad made clear that the privacy claims were in relation to ad targeting, which Outlook.com does not carry out, we therefore concluded that the ad was not misleading," said the ASA.

The ASA said that Microsoft's claims did not breach UK rules relating to misleading advertising.