- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
It’s not “Gmail can read your emails” … Gmail has been reading your emails for years.
Well, now it’s training LLMs on them.
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.
These instructions are good for while you’re on the search and in the process of switching
When you do this it puts a permanent banner on the top of the screen. FUCK GOOGLE. DESTROY THEM.
mine had a dismiss button and it didn’t come back …yet
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.
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.
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.
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…
I’ve already found recent emails in my gmail account for right-leaning news sources I’ve had to opt out of. I’ve been lax on my gmail management until last year I went on a major cleanup spree, so I know these new emails were automatically added somehow, and this article likely explains it.
The ‘V’ in AI stands for value. The price of TuLLMips can only go up.
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.
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?
Why is my institution blocking malwarebytes??
The word “malware” being in the URL, if I had to guess
🤦
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.
Googles push for everything is aggressive. Their apps constantly push Chrome on me.
It irks me that all you ever hear about is “Ugh, Microsoft trying to force people to use Edge again”
And yet, when I did use Edge, I had to install an extension to remove the huge “We recommend using Chrome” banner on every Google service. 😬
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.
ChatGPT will remember this
You don’t want to know what it’ll learn…
I’m so happy I dropped gmail.






