this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2025
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The only option is smart features, on or off. That requires Google to read the email to categorize them and do a lot of basic stuff. It doesn't let you narrowly have more privacy on specific features. It's all or nothing, and if you get a lot of emails then it's hard to turn it off if you already use categories. Google always does all or nothing because they know people need some of it, same with location. It has to be precise location tracking to use things, you can't just do rough location.
Yes, but the point is that granting Google permission to manage your data by AI is a very different thing from training the AI on your data. You can do all the things you describe without also having the AI train on the data, indeed it's a hard bit of extra work to train the AI on the data as well.
If the setting isn't specifically saying that it's to let them train AI on your data then I'm inclined to believe that's not what it's for. They're very different processes, both technically and legally. I think there's just some click-baiting going on here with the scary "they're training on your data!" Accusation, it seems to be baseless.
So you think that they're not using your data simply because they're not telling you that they are? Don't be naive. Since when are these companies asking for permission? I'm not even confident opting out does anything. At this point, your safest bet is to not use their services.
So they are using AI but not in a capacity that would make it learn? Doubt
Yes, exactly. Training an AI is a completely different process from prompting it, it takes orders of magnitude more work and can't be done on a model that's currently in use.