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 👍
All digital transactions. Society isn’t free.
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’tBe Evil.
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.
I know and regret. But didnt change it because its a good example for both can be used to trick us into a direction.
The tyranny of the default .
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.
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.
Stop using google anything! Simple as that. They are a parasite. Stop feeding them!
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):
- Buy your own domain name (e.g., YourSurnameEmail.com)
- Set up your email provider to use your Custom Domain name. Or alternatively, sign up for a service like Addy.io and use your domain name there to create alias emails.
- Go to your domain name manager and add the settings your email provider tells you to use. This will enable your domain name to serve emails.
- Start sending and receiving emails using your own custom email address that belongs to you.
- Don’t like your email provider after a few years? Simply find a new one. Change your domain name settings to point your domain name to your new email provider. All your email addresses stay with you and you NEVER have to change email addresses again.
- Swap every email login you have to use a new alias email. For example, facebook123@yoursurname.com for Facebook, random.word123@yoursurname.com for some web site login, Steam123@yoursurname.com for Steam gaming, etc. Save all credentials to your password manager.
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.
The biggest issue is all the accounts I have attached to Gmail. Its a lot and I dont know how to move
I had the same problem too. Many years ago in December the final weeks when businesses are slow, I painstakingly went through and edited every single one of my accounts one at a time and changed emails. If there was a legacy thing I couldn’t access or a system that wouldn’t let you change your email, then I discarded it. How do you eat a dinosaur? One bite at a time.
Through my investment in time, all my accounts are managed via the method I commented above. I own my email, and I control how I get contacted.
I’m just replying so I’ll find your comments back easily in a few days
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.
Not the one you answered to, but if you have a recommendation for linux and windows please tell.
ohhh I didn’t notice that, well this is enough to finally push me to actually leave. I kept delaying it
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.
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.
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…
Companies make a little money selling your information. It is better to assume that any information you hand over to a private entity will be sold. It doesn’t matter if they say that it isn’t going to be at that time. Should they ever fold your information goes to the first bidder.
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
🤦
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?
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. 😬
The ‘V’ in AI stands for value. The price of TuLLMips can only go up.
