375
Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out
(www.malwarebytes.com)
So glad I switched email and calender services years ago.
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2025
375 points (96.8% liked)
Technology
80267 readers
4068 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Remember, Google is not alone:
Can’t wait to see what their dogshit AI will output after being trained on all the LinkedIn lunatics
We’ve updated this article after realising we contributed to a perfect storm of misunderstanding around a recent change in the wording and placement of Gmail’s smart features. The settings themselves aren’t new, but the way Google recently rewrote and surfaced them led a lot of people (including us) to believe Gmail content might be used to train Google’s AI models, and that users were being opted in automatically. After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
lol
eh, who reads fine print. they do it anyway. feel good switch. yah! ai wrote the correction
I opened GMail and it specifically asked me to give consent in a descriptive/onboarding popover. Declining was choosing one of the two options. I'm in EU, it may be different elsewhere (title and article about US?).
How to "opt out":
- Open Gmail desktop in browser
- Settings icon
View all settingsGeneraltab- Unchecked
Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet
I think it's cute how everyone thinks that just by clicking the little opt-out button they're actually going to magically not have already fed your entire email backlog into their massive AI database. 😂
But hey, scouts honor, if you click that opt-out button they promise never to use any of your new emails in their constant information scape of your life.
You're probably right, and that's why it is in quotes, but I figured if I can save some people from reading a "there's no readon this is 12 screens long" article I would.
FWIW I dont use Gmail at all anyway.
Mine was already off and I don't remember turning it off. I'm gonna assume it does nothing.
I have yet to see any of these news sites show evidence that this setting is for allowing training with your data. That's not what the setting itself says, it seems like this is just a panicked ripple of clickbait titles sweeping rapidly across social media on a wave of AI dopamine.
Because if there's one thing we know about AI companies, it's that they definitely tell you what data they're planning on using to train their AI.
You are being sarcastic but this is indeed the case. Especially for companies like Google, which are concerned about being sued or dumped by major corporations that very much don't want their data to be used for training without permission.
There's a bit of a free-for-all with published data these days, but private data is another matter.
I think we should stay and teach it to swear. A lot. I want it to casually throw things like “fuckery” and “suck start a shotgun” into business emails.
Like a consent button will stop them doing it anyway. Consent is something for little people. They don't believe in it.
If it sees my attachments then all it's gonna get is a lot of very poorly written smut. Happy to help make the lying machine worse, guys.
I tried this and was no longer able to separate my email into Primary Updates and Promotions, and I started getting pings for every stupid ad. So I put it back. I think I'll start sending weird emails to myself; "teach your kids (the AI) to talk wrong."
It did the same for me but I took it as an opportunity to wisely unsubscribe from all the crap in my gmail
Yes you are wise. I have a couple gifts ordered from companies who have decided to bombard me with spam, but I need to track the order until it arrives and then I can block them.
You can usually unsubscribe from the marketing emails and still get the tracking notifications if you don’t want to wait
Edit: Also the ‘wisely’ was supposed to be ‘finally’ haha autocorrect needs to lay off the whiskey
Just to add to this. Having a unsubscribe link in emails is a common way to trick ppl into clicking links, so if you do not know where the email comes from then just block it.
I just make judicious use of filters, especially if I don't know if the company will honor the unsubscribe preference or just use that to confirm my email.
I have a number of emails and strings in filters that are an automatic delete because so many companies fucking spam shit constantly.
If they give you a standard tracking number just slap it into https://www.packagetrackr.com/ and call it a day
I've been paying for fastmail for a few months now, pretty happy with it so far. The masked mails and aliases are great. Havent really used the storage and calender yet
I use thunderbird but I don't know what email server to use!! No outlook because fuck Microsoft too, but my Gmail gotta go too if it's this blatantly intrusive. Who do I use?? I'm too poor to host myself.
Who is down voting me for this? I am asking a serious question. 😭
Hehe idk.
posteo for 1 eur/month? (Heard good stuff)
ProtonMail is a good free option (if I were paying and didn't care about using my own custom domain posteo seems a lot better & cheaper)
Proton mail charges to be compatible with Thunderbird I tried that already.
True, forgot about that. They are the best free option that forces you to use webmail if you don't want to pay (and their app).
I'm not sure if there are any other free mail providers that i'd trust to be honest (if I absolutely can't pay for one, I'd just live with protons webmail).
Posteo should work for you and it's very cheap (1 eur).
If you can afford $20/year, that'd be $10 for a domain and $10 for purelymail account, that's an option.
and that's how Gemini 3 is made?
I only have one fake google account on an isolated VM with dedicated VPN. For the rare cases it's unavoidable for something. Whoever actually uses gmail, will get what they pay for.
But this is probably anti-AI-ragebait anyway.
wtf is your threat model where you're using a throwaway gmail in a vm on a vpn? you in iran or something bro? shiiiiiiiiit
Hehe, nah, germany. But I like my privacy and don't like gifting away my data for free :)
slipped in enabled. def turned off. ai probably gobbles your stuff first when you turn it off.
Mine were already off.
Yeah have fun with my newsletters, receipts and spam.
Like, literally. I have not sent a private email since 2010 xD
Yeah, I only have my gmail accounts for logins to various websites. They will only have LLM generated spam emails to train on from this