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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.
It’s not “Gmail can read your emails” … Gmail has been reading your emails for years.
All digital transactions. Society isn’t free.
Well, now it’s training LLMs on them.
I think they do that anyway… Well, I’m pretty sure, but your initiative/warning is 👍
Yup. Kinda why I’ve been using my gmail account as image storage for the last 19 years, and nothing else, since I made it.
That was stated from the get-go, that Google reserved the right to scan for potential ad-words in order to advertise a product you might have written about in a correspondence.
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
Or: use a different email provider.
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.
Don’tBe Evil.
I’m so happy I dropped gmail.
If they are training on my emails, they are going to be dumb as fuck.
Honestly I don’t get how AI isn’t rolling backwards already. Image sites are burried in AI slop. Social media posts are burried in AI slop, and now e-mails, that were probably written by AIs. How is AI even remotely improving right now, when obviously 90% of any new training data it’s getting, was generated by the last generation of AI.
Ai is inbred.
Companies that build large LLMs have already said that this is becoming a problem. They’re running out of high-quality human-written content to train their models.
Google paid Reddit to get access to their data to train their models, which is probably why their AI can be a bit dumb at times (and of course, the users that actually contributed the content don’t get any of that money)
that’s true, but I think it’s in the phrasing, they describe it as a shortage of human made content. the bigger issue to note is the lack of ability to identify human made content. IE you give it reddit and our e-mails, there’s plenty of human made content on there… but nobody knows what percentage of it is actually bots or AIs.
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’ve been off Gmail for years and deleted all my Google accounts. Here’s how you can do it, too.
Step 1: Export your emails from Gmail into an EML file.
Step 2: Sign up for a new paid email provider: Tuta, Mailbox.org, Proton to name a few.
Step 3: Import your emails.
Done.
Optional Steps (that I recommend):
- Buy your own domain name (e.g., YourSurnameEmail.com)
- Set up your email provider to use your Custom Domain name. Or alternatively, sign up for a service like Addy.io and use your domain name there to create alias emails.
- Go to your domain name manager and add the settings your email provider tells you to use. This will enable your domain name to serve emails.
- Start sending and receiving emails using your own custom email address that belongs to you.
- Don’t like your email provider after a few years? Simply find a new one. Change your domain name settings to point your domain name to your new email provider. All your email addresses stay with you and you NEVER have to change email addresses again.
- Swap every email login you have to use a new alias email. For example, facebook123@yoursurname.com for Facebook, random.word123@yoursurname.com for some web site login, Steam123@yoursurname.com for Steam gaming, etc. Save all credentials to your password manager.
With this, you now have a unique email address for every single service, and all those alias email addresses forward your email to your actual email address. The benefit is that no one knows your real email address except you. Bye bye SPAM. When an alias email gets leaked or sold, you’ll know which company failed you. Simply swap to a different alias email, and disable the compromised alias - all SPAM stops.
If you’re not already doing so, you probably should use a 3rd party client that can connect to Gmail and filter out spam.
If you tell us what platforms you use, we can probably provide some recommendations of stuff to explore.
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 will end up releasing private info in some form, right?
And unfortunately most people dont realize or care because they ‘have nothing to hide’. Having something to hide or not, I want my privacy!
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.
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.
Google’s push for using Gemini is so aggressive. Everything is littered with pop ups.
You don’t want to know what it’ll learn…
