Google has quietly introduced multiple AI features in the past few months to train its AI models, including emails stored in Gmail. Gmail nowadays consists not only of emails, but also has lots of private attachments, receipts, bills, and conversations, all of which can be used by Google’s generative AI features, unless one manually opts out. Thankfully, a tech expert has prompted Gmail users to re-examine their privacy settings amid these fresh concerns around data privacy and AI-driven services.
How to stop Gmail from accessing emails for AI training
The alert was issued by engineering YouTuber Davey Jones, who claims that Gmail users have been ‘automatically OPTED IN to allow Gmail to access all your private messages & attachments to train AI models.’ However, to turn off this feature, he has advised manually turning off Smart Features in the Gmail Settings menu, located in ‘TWO Locations.’
He has then shared some screenshots from Google’s settings for Gmail, highlighting the 'Smart features' toggle. A Gmail user needs to click on ‘See all settings,’ find the ‘Smart features’ setting, and uncheck ‘Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet. Then Gmail users can also select and turn off all the sections in the Google Workspace smart feature settings to further adjust permissions related to Google Workspace. These changes would purportedly not allow Google to use your email data for training its AI models.
However, many popular Gmail AI tools, such as ‘smart compose,’ email filtering of ‘promotional’ and ‘social’ categories, and other niche tools like grammar check or autocorrection of emails, would be disabled. Moreover, in response to Davey Jones’ claim, a Google representative has told HuffPost via email that these concerns are misleading and the company does not use your Gmail content for training the Gemini AI models.
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