The entire premise of this discussion is people complaining about the design of the ads, whether in a banner, sponsored content, product placement, or masquerading as emails.

> They don't accumulate in your inbox like unfilted spam does. They are not serviced if you use other systems to interact with your inbox.

These are interesting observations, but it's all still ads.

That's a good point. I was simply trying to clarify what the original commenter meant—I don't really have much of a horse in the race myself. I think the gmail ads are probably worse than spam in some ways and better than others. Like you say, they don't accumulate, and they're limited to the web client. But they're also based on much more detailed targeting and real-time bidding data that spam emails don't have access to—which ultimately might be much more harmful to privacy overall.