This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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.
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
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.
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't~~ Be Evil.
Step 3: Verify if both are off
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.
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.
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)
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.
Ai is inbred.
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.
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.
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
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):
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.
The problem I've been seeing with email on my own domain is that some services refuse it, saying "please enter a real email address" 🤬 some others just silently refuse to send a confirmation code so I can't register either (I think tinder did this). Especially the "not a real email address" really pissed me off.
And with proton I got "Anonimisation services are forbidden" once at least.
I forget which services, but it's Hella annoying..
The marketshare of Google and Microsoft on email is really becoming a problem.
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.
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
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.
Why is my institution blocking malwarebytes??
The word "malware" being in the URL, if I had to guess
🤦
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.
This crosses a line because information will be exfiltrated. Gemini will be telling someone that I gave bubba a blow.
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?
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...
My email account is almost entirely spam and ads. Have at it morons.
The ‘V’ in AI stands for value. The price of TuLLMips can only go up.
