It's not "Gmail can read your emails" .... Gmail has been reading your emails for years.
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)
Well, now it’s training LLMs on them.
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.
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
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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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
LLMs waste many more (physical) resources than ads
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.
Why is my institution blocking malwarebytes??
The word "malware" being in the URL, if I had to guess
🤦
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?
Yea. It is deep search.
I turned it off from the gmail android app and as soon as I returned to the inbox there's a notification asking me to flip it back.
Google’s push for using Gemini is so aggressive. Everything is littered with pop ups.
Googles push for everything is aggressive. Their apps constantly push Chrome on me.
It irks me that all you ever hear about is "Ugh, Microsoft trying to force people to use Edge again"
And yet, when I did use Edge, I had to install an extension to remove the huge "We recommend using Chrome" banner on every Google service. 😬
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.
I mean in general. Not just google...
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This will end up releasing private info in some form, right?
The ‘V’ in AI stands for value. The price of TuLLMips can only go up.
I'm so happy I dropped gmail.
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.
What did people expect handing all their personal information to Google?
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