So glad I switched email and calender services years ago.
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2025
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Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out
(www.malwarebytes.com)
I opened GMail and it specifically asked me to give consent in a descriptive/onboarding popover. Declining was choosing one of the two options. I'm in EU, it may be different elsewhere (title and article about US?).
The age of accelerated enshitification is upon us (has been for a minute)
It's not really enshittification when "Google reads your mail" has been the entire point since the launch of GMail. Relevant ads, grouping mails into topics, find spam, etc. has always been the selling point of GMail.
I have yet to see any of these news sites show evidence that this setting is for allowing training with your data. That's not what the setting itself says, it seems like this is just a panicked ripple of clickbait titles sweeping rapidly across social media on a wave of AI dopamine.
Because if there's one thing we know about AI companies, it's that they definitely tell you what data they're planning on using to train their AI.
You are being sarcastic but this is indeed the case. Especially for companies like Google, which are concerned about being sued or dumped by major corporations that very much don't want their data to be used for training without permission.
There's a bit of a free-for-all with published data these days, but private data is another matter.
I tried this and was no longer able to separate my email into Primary Updates and Promotions, and I started getting pings for every stupid ad. So I put it back. I think I'll start sending weird emails to myself; "teach your kids (the AI) to talk wrong."
It did the same for me but I took it as an opportunity to wisely unsubscribe from all the crap in my gmail
Yes you are wise. I have a couple gifts ordered from companies who have decided to bombard me with spam, but I need to track the order until it arrives and then I can block them.
You can usually unsubscribe from the marketing emails and still get the tracking notifications if you don’t want to wait
Edit: Also the ‘wisely’ was supposed to be ‘finally’ haha autocorrect needs to lay off the whiskey
Just to add to this. Having a unsubscribe link in emails is a common way to trick ppl into clicking links, so if you do not know where the email comes from then just block it.
I just make judicious use of filters, especially if I don't know if the company will honor the unsubscribe preference or just use that to confirm my email.
I have a number of emails and strings in filters that are an automatic delete because so many companies fucking spam shit constantly.
If they give you a standard tracking number just slap it into https://www.packagetrackr.com/ and call it a day
We’ve updated this article after realising we contributed to a perfect storm of misunderstanding around a recent change in the wording and placement of Gmail’s smart features. The settings themselves aren’t new, but the way Google recently rewrote and surfaced them led a lot of people (including us) to believe Gmail content might be used to train Google’s AI models, and that users were being opted in automatically. After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case.
lol
eh, who reads fine print. they do it anyway. feel good switch. yah! ai wrote the correction
I think we should stay and teach it to swear. A lot. I want it to casually throw things like “fuckery” and “suck start a shotgun” into business emails.
Like a consent button will stop them doing it anyway. Consent is something for little people. They don't believe in it.
slipped in enabled. def turned off. ai probably gobbles your stuff first when you turn it off.
Yeah have fun with my newsletters, receipts and spam.
Like, literally. I have not sent a private email since 2010 xD
Yeah, I only have my gmail accounts for logins to various websites. They will only have LLM generated spam emails to train on from this
I only have one fake google account on an isolated VM with dedicated VPN. For the rare cases it's unavoidable for something. Whoever actually uses gmail, will get what they pay for.
But this is probably anti-AI-ragebait anyway.