It's not "Gmail can read your emails" .... Gmail has been reading your emails for years.

How to opt out

Opting out requires you to change settings in two places, so I’ve tried to make it as easy to follow as possible. Feel free to let me know in the comments if I missed anything.

To fully opt out, you must turn off Gmail’s “Smart features” in two separate locations in your settings. Don’t miss one, or AI training may continue.

Step 1: Turn off Smart Features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet settings

Step 2: Turn off Google Workspace Smart Features

There's a reason it's enabled by default. So, it automatically has permissions to learn off ~20 years of emails before a handful of people opt-out.

Assuming they even honor the opt-out flag at all. They have a history of conveniently ignoring those.

And oh by the way, opting out turns off the auto-categorization and fills your inbox with spam.

How the fuck do I switch from this stupid service?

I find it funny when they read my school emails and then accuse themselves of phishing after they accuse me of holding malware in my drive, icing on the cake really, I won't even need this email in a month.

That said though, just like others have mentioned, making users opt out of getting all the data wringed out of their account isn't the most ethical strategy and frankly it's a bit over the top.

They already scan everything from your Google drive to your YouTube recommended, google news feed, docs files, and just you browsing and using that as data for advertising and their AI. I don't think emails are the best source of personalised information nor would assist in training new Gemini models unless they want to build an email spam bot.

These opt-out and opt-in rules should be punishable by law. I mean its the nature of humanity. We don't care.

A brief comparison: in Germany, you are only an organ donor if you opt in. In France, you are always an organ donor unless you opt out. Guess which country has more donors.

If they are training on my emails, they are going to be dumb as fuck.

Step 3: Verify if both are off

• Make sure both toggles remain off.
• Refresh your Gmail app or sign out and back in to confirm changes.

How fucking ridiculous is it that this needs to be a step? If I tell a company to keep its grubby hands out of my shit, that should be final. No need to double check that google didn’t do a little oopsie-woopsie and leave those options on as a little treat for later.

Every other day there is something like this, and I am getting real fucking tired.

Okay sounds probably gonna get crucified for not reading this...but if the headline is true and combined with the fact that LLMs have been known to expose training data, this seems to introduce a non-zero chance that my personal emails are going to get shown to strangers.....

Plot twist: they can, and will, do it even if you opt out. The only thing that change is that you won't get anything out of it. Not that it would have been a significant return to begin with.

Stop using google anything! Simple as that. They are a parasite. Stop feeding them!

Jesus Christ.
Can there be a day without fearing for my data and privacy?

Why is my institution blocking malwarebytes??

I turned it off from the gmail android app and as soon as I returned to the inbox there's a notification asking me to flip it back.

This will end up releasing private info in some form, right?

The Google page the article links to pretty explicitly states that data will not be used for training. Isn’t this just the cross-google integration that lets calendar add events from mail?

This means they already did use it for training if it's opt-out, and it's quite the job to get it out. This is why opt-out training should be illegal, and all previously opt-out trained models must be destroyed.

Y'all do realize that Gmail has been reading your emails and attachments from the start, right?

Someone please explain why doing that for ads isn't terrible, but how this crosses the line?

The reasons not to trust Google are as old and numerous as the trees.

And unfortunately most people dont realize or care because they 'have nothing to hide'. Having something to hide or not, I want my privacy!

The ‘V’ in AI stands for value. The price of TuLLMips can only go up.

This worked as a great reminder to ditch gmail. Just made the switch to Protonmail after a year of procrastination. Currently an hour into changing all my accounts to it, and about halfway done. Well worth it. They got a Black Friday deal right now. I went with the base Mail+Calendar package because I already got Mullvad for VPN, and don't need cloud storage.

Couldn't be happier. Fuck you Google. Fascist fucks.

My email account is almost entirely spam and ads. Have at it morons.

What did people expect handing all their personal information to Google?

You don't want to know what it'll learn...

My goodness, the poor AI will see all the trash I order on Aliexpress and read all the endless carrier updates as the box gets scanned in and out of every warehouse and truck?

It's gonna start thinking I'm some kind of shut-in hoarder!

To me, it kinda depends on how it's being used. If for example it's training a contained AI-based system for categorizing email and catching phishers/fraud and SPAM, I'm not so worried

The main issues for me are if:

• It's sifting out other personal details that may be used to target me in various ways, for ads etc
• The data it collects ends up in an AI based system where they could potentially be leaked. Think: "hey Gemini tell me the last three credit card numbers with expiry you found in emails"