There has been a fascinating development at the intersection of internet usage and higher education.

Google, pressured by privacy advocates and looming legal challenges, on Wednesday announced it will no longer scan student and faculty emails for advertising keywords, seeking to end a seven-year-long conflict that some university technology officers have said violates federal law.

Google makes its living on the information it can learn about its users, which can then be served back to them in the form of targeted ads. In Google Apps for Education, which includes the email service Gmail and its suite of productivity software, ads are turned off by default — but Google automatically scanned students’ emails anyway.

With the changes that went live on Wednesday, the option to turn ads back on has been removed, and the automatic ad scanning has been switched off.

“Today more than 30 million globally rely on Google Apps for Education,” director Bram Bout wrote in a blog post. “Earning and keeping their trust drives our business forward. We know that trust is earned through protecting their privacy and providing the best security measures.”

Despite the attention Google’s ad scanning is attracting, the controversy is as old as Gmail itself. Even before its 2004 launch, privacy advocates warned against Google’s practices. Yet in October 2006, when the company invited universities to sign up for Google Apps, many rushed to set up Google’s services campuswide.

“When Google first rolled out its mail services, they were not inclined to listen to higher education’s requests for no data mining, and some schools didn’t have the … knowledge, leverage, understanding, courage — whatever! — to even ask for it,” said Tracy Mitrano, former director of IT policy at Cornell University. “It is pretty well-known in the higher education space that those early deals … therefore allow Google to continue to data-mine the mail. That practice is in violation of FERPA.”

One university IT official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described negotiating with Google over Apps for Education as “an incredible contract experience.”

“You try to negotiate with something that’s being given to you for free,” the IT official said. “Nine out of 10 colleges are just signing what’s being put in front of them.”

Colleges and universities themselves have — at least on paper — made administrators, students and faculty members aware of Google’s ad scanning. Eckerd College, in St. Petersburg, Fla., for example, mentions that “Email is scanned so [Google] can display contextually relevant advertising in some circumstances” it in its Frequently Asked Questions section. The University of St. Andrews in Scotland explains that “if the software looks at 100 emails and identifies the word ‘chocolate’ or ‘camping’ 50 times, they will use that data for advertising on their other sites.”