Google promises(new window) that Gmail’s 3 billion users will benefit from a “personal, proactive inbox assistant”. But given that these features are free, what’s the catch? Make no mistake, Google isn’t doing this out of generosity. The contents of your inbox are valuable to the company.

Email used to be a more private space where your communications could potentially be intercepted by bad actors, but largely your data was your own.

I dont think that is true wrt gmail is it? Google have been scanning your messages and using that for machine learning based ad targeting since it was released.