I'm surprised there's even an opt out.
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2025
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Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out
(www.malwarebytes.com)
Don’t worry they bundled all the email sorting features with the AI. If you disable it they combine your primary, social, and promotion inboxes into one.
I would be surprised if they don't do it even if you opt out...
They've used petabites of copyrighted material, but oh no, not Joey's emails!
"when you agree to turn this feature on..."
Bitch I didn't turn it on! At the very least, I was conned into implied consent.
Whats the go-to non Google email?
I believe tuta might be the best easily available alternative (besides hosting your own)
Outlook/Hotmail and it's not even close. If you really want secure and non-scummy email, host your own MX sender. Make sure DMARC is up to date or you'll hit spam filters all the time. You may also want to add a 2nd public IP for the purpose.
I assumed that Outlook was to be avoided based on the Microsoft connection. Is that not true? Sorry - I'm not in the loop here.
I trust them marginally more, personally. But more for their sensitivity to privacy law over some of the underhanded by-the-numbers approaches that Google uses, banking on human laziness to miss a checkbox or not sync'd across browser, mobile, and core account profiles.
Microsoft is very much in the business of making other businesses personally trust them, and that seems to extend to their privacy notices and settings.
Then again, they might just hide it better than google. Anyone with a source can chip in.
Source: MSP Escalation Tech who has been asked specifically by businesses whether G-Workspace or MS365 is more secure, from a privacy standpoint. I have not looked into free outlook accounts per-se, but the backend is the same and it's trivial to set up a 365 business tenant with all the bells and whistles if you want to pay a license fee.
The logic I follow is that Microsoft is slightly safer than Google, if only because they're probably less capable of doing anything with the data they scrape. Security by incompetence.
Incompetance doesn't build and maintain the world's leading Operating System... But I believe it has more to do with the privacy scare with Windows 10's launch, during the Alexa/Cortana/Siri always-on-mic stuff.
Maybe incompetence was too strong a word, but interacting with many MS services feels so disjoint and siloed, I just don't see them building and leveraging user profiles as extensively as Google does.
Now that is a true statement. Google loves their "everything in one bucket" style of computing. MS is service-based. They have a framework (rn that's Azure, but Windows is also a framework) and bells and whistles get added as needed.
I understood a few of those words.
I use Tuta, though will probably switch to something a little more agnostic like Mailbox.org when I'm up for renewal.
If it’s opt out that means all your data was instantly scraped already
Opting out does nothing but prevent future email theft (if they’re even being truthful)
No it can't because I don't have gmail 😎
Making sure you dont send anything to a google monitored account is the tough part.
I turned it off but I'm guessing they already grabbed my entire history. Feels kind of private for that kind of brazen attitude.
Stop using google services!
Businesses can't do that, because that's where the masses are. They can be as careful as they can be, but it's kind hard to stop if people don't want to go to a different platform like Odysee, Rumble, Bitchute, or PeerTube.
Like in the past, most of the Smart Features are still turned off for me, however, Google sneakily turned on the Workspace stuff...Annoying, so I toggled that stuff off once again. I am debating on if I really should return to Android (but it interacts better with Linux than iOS). Thankfully, most of my important accounts are being diverted to Tuta Mail. Gmail is mostly my spam inbox.
to be honest this has been up for a while; I had opted out maybe last year or something along those lines
I just left my gmail to flood itself with useless spam so good luck lol
Ah reminds me of the days when we all abandoned our Hotmail & yahoo accounts to switch to the new Gmail. That was a few years before Google stopped promising to not be evil.
How do I opt out?
Read the article...
First thing that popped up when accessing gmail.com. Two toggles.
Abbreviated version from article:
How to opt out
Opting out requires you to change settings in two places. To fully opt out, you must turn off Gmail’s “Smart features” in two separate locations in your settings.
Step 1: Turn off Smart Features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet settings
Step 2: Turn off Google Workspace Smart Features
Thank you.
Switching off gmail is a pain in the butt, but well worth it. I did so 4 years ago (I know because I just paid my annual Fastmail charges) and I've felt nothing but grateful about it since... well, maybe just a touch of smug feeling sometimes.