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.
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.
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.
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.
Hmm… Guess I’ll have to switch to Protomail. It’ll be annoying to try and change all my accounts to the new email…
Its a little annoying, but much less than I always feared. Make a note with every service you can think of, brew some coffee, put on some music and zone out for a bit haha.
Pretty much done now, took less than 2 hours.
You got this!Well, it’s going to be much more annoying with my work.
I’m a union rep at my work place. To that effect I created a second Gmail account for work/rep related mail. I still get half my mail sent to my personal email… Even though I have reminded them multiple times to send that to my work email.
Though it also took the 8 months to update my home address… I’m not entirely sure if it’s actually updated.
My email account is almost entirely spam and ads. Have at it morons.
Jesus Christ.
Can there be a day without fearing for my data and privacy?Not if you trust your data to a company that makes money from selling said data to advertising companies.
Companies make a little money selling your information. It is better to assume that any information you hand over to a private entity will be sold. It doesn’t matter if they say that it isn’t going to be at that time. Should they ever fold your information goes to the first bidder.
I mean in general. Not just google…
What did people expect handing all their personal information to Google?
It’s not “Gmail can read your emails” … Gmail has been reading your emails for years.
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.
All digital transactions. Society isn’t free.
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.
TbF I feel like you cited one of the few instances where opt out is actually a very good thing.
I know and regret. But didnt change it because its a good example for both can be used to trick us into a direction.
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.
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!
A variant of “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”.
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.
Annnnd dont send email to anyone who uses gmail, either…
Very very good point. Google’s ubiquity makes that very difficult.
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.
Stop using google anything! Simple as that. They are a parasite. Stop feeding them!
I really like Gmaps and YouTube though. That is really the main things I struggle getting rid of. Maps not so much for navigation but for exploring local businesses and YouTube is a monopoly.
You can use youtube without being logged in (and there are alternate frontends too, but they all have issues whenever google decides to break stuff).
If you want to follow people you can actually do it without an account through RSS
This week I noticed Google and gmaps rubbi6ng slowly on a non-Chrome browser. Unusable level of slow.
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.
From what I’ve been hearing, AI has indeed been getting worse, not better. I think I read this in relation to ChatGPT 5 compared to previous models.
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.
Ai is inbred.
