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Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out

malwarebytes.com

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Re: Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out

#31

Post by dom96 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #14
magixx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They disable so many features when you remove "Smart features" i.e. Grammar, Spelling, Autocorrect, Smart Compose/Reply (those templated suggested replies), Nudges, Package tracking, Desktop notifications. Google really wants to punish you for doing that.

Turning off the inbox categories feature was particularly annoying. A feature they had for a good decade before deciding they weren't jsut happy with collecting my data.

ugh, yeah, I was going to turn this off but not having inbox categories is a deal breaker

Re: Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out

#32

Post by faidit »

It's just for "improving", not training! Why would anyone assume the worst? They're the good guys.. more like a cuddly teddy bear than a monopolistic megacorp! Surely they'd explicitly tell us exactly what they were doing before they do it. Stop fear-mongering, people! anxiously checks the price of my GOOG stock

Re: Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out

#33

Post by jeffbee »

greyadept wrote: post #26
jeffbee wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you believe you have gained by throwing those switches?

I think I’m improving my security posture. For example, I’d hope that prompt injection attacks against Gemini AI will be less likely to scoop my data.

These switches don't control whether your emails are used to train models. They control whether you get to use machine inference features on your own emails.

Re: Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out

#34

Post by jeffbee »

qwerpy wrote: post #27
johnnyanmac wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turning off the inbox categories feature was particularly annoying. A feature they had for a good decade before deciding they weren't jsut happy with collecting my data.

Yep I went through this sad journey with my gmail this week. Got tired of seeing "coming soon" packages cluttering up my inbox, so I looked into how to turn them off. It turned off the categories. Reminds me of the dark pattern used by many apps, where if you turn off notifications to avoid ads/spam, you also lose useful notifications.

There's an entire setting for "Turn on package tracking" alone. You do not need to disable Smart Features altogether.

Re: Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out

#35

Post by defrost »

jeffbee wrote: post #19
teachrdan wrote: post #4

Link for the lazy: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/general Find "Smart Features", uncheck, and press save, which will reload Gmail. Then find "Google Workspace smart features" and click the "Manage Workspace smart features settings" button and unselect everything.

What do you believe you have gained by throwing those switches?

Reclaiming my English.

I'm Australian, I use Australian idioms, spelling, contractions, et al in emails to regular contacts for 20+ years via gmail (Yet Another Early Gmail Invite User).

Despite having selected UK English (there's no 'Strayla option) gmail via the web still insists on suggesting I morph into a cookie cutter middle north American Engrish typer.

Yes, Engrish .. AmerEngrish is an abomination.

Feck that shite. Hard.

Re: Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out

#36

Post by neuralkoi »

falleng0d wrote: post #10

From the dialogues in the pictures it doesn’t sound like they are using anyones emails for training. The messaging indicates it’s more like using as context and/or generating embeddings for RAG. Unless there’s something else I’m not aware of. I know that Google does a lot of bad stuff but we don’t need to make up stuff they just aren’t doing This doomsday messaging an alarmism is only serves to degrade the whole caus…

This seems to indeed be confirmed over at https://support.google.com/mail/answer/14615114

"Your data stays in Workspace. We do not use your Workspace data to train or improve the underlying generative AI and large language models that power Gemini, Search, and other systems outside of Workspace without permission."

Re: Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out

#38

Post by jerrygoyal »

Hey, if anyone wants to use AI to draft replies but wants to make sure their data isn't trained by it, I've built a Chrome extension that does exactly that! You can plug in your API key, and it supports all SOTA models.

https://jetwriter.ai

Re: Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out

#39

Post by djhn »

neuralkoi wrote: post #36
falleng0d wrote: post #10

From the dialogues in the pictures it doesn’t sound like they are using anyones emails for training. The messaging indicates it’s more like using as context and/or generating embeddings for RAG. Unless there’s something else I’m not aware of. I know that Google does a lot of bad stuff but we don’t need to make up stuff they just aren’t doing This doomsday messaging an alarmism is only serves to degrade the whole caus…

This seems to indeed be confirmed over at https://support.google.com/mail/answer/14615114 "Your data stays in Workspace. We do not use your Workspace data to train or improve the underlying generative AI and large language models that power Gemini, Search, and other systems outside of Workspace without permission."

But then if the terms include a vague permission and/or license to use the data for improving the results, the text is factually correct while obscuring the fact that they do in fact solicit your permission and thus use the data, with your permission.

Re: Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out

#40

Post by fsflover »

jmclnx wrote: post #25
johnnyanmac wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you move too? I was thinking of moving my personal email off of Gmail for a while. It's just 15+ years of accounts to untangle. I long made a "spam/unimportant site verification " account, so that's set.

My own domain.

Alternatively these exist: https://www.fsf.org/resources/webmail-systems
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