Gmail Users React to Google’s New AI Changes

0:00Everyone knows that listens to this podcast. I am very bullish on Google right now. They're pulling out a ton of incredible advancements in AI when it comes to Gemini. Of course, they're the ones that originally founded the entire AI industry with the Transformer paper and the research that they helped complete there. So Google is not going anywhere anytime soon, and typically I'm quite positive on everything they're doing. That being said, when companies do things that I think are perhaps unethical or wrong, I'm going to call them out. And today on the podcast, I want to talk about the fact most people do not know that Gmail can read your emails and your attachments to train its AI unless you opt out.

0:40The way that they went about this, I don't feel like is very straightforward or transparent. So I'm going to call it out on the podcast, explain to you what they're doing, how you can opt out. And a lot of the information I'm going to be getting is coming from the Malwarebytes lab blog. If you have ever seen Malwarebytes, it's kind of like an antivirus software I remember I used to have on my Windows computer growing up. So they do some great work in security. They have a great blog. And Peter Arntz put together a really great piece that I'm going to be covering, getting a lot of information from and sharing today on the podcast.

1:15Before we get into that, if you want to get access to all of the AI models I talk about here, including Gemini, Grok, Claude, OpenAI, and every other major model, whether it's text, audio, image, go check out my startup AIbox.ai. There's a link in the description. You get access to all of the top AI models, over 40 of them, for$20 a month, and it's an incredible place to not have to make a million subscriptions. All right, let's get into the podcast today. So Google has kind of stealthily added a bunch of features that allow Gmail to access all private messages and the attachments that you have in your Gmail to train their AI models.

1:54If you use Gmail, I definitely think this is something that should startle you. And if you don't, I think this is an important story to listen to because this does also impact a lot of other companies that may be looking at doing this as well in the future. so the reason behind this is essentially the fact that google's ai assistance like smart compose which essentially help you do these ai generated replies in your gmail you've probably seen them they have gemini built in now so when you're reading your email um there'll be a little bubble that pops up which is this ai generated reply it's super useful and i think a lot of people are like okay yeah google obviously has to read my emails in order to understand how to do a reply that's not a problem i think what people are concerned about is the fact that google could then take the contents of your email and train Gemini with them.

2:43And Google's like, well, we want to make Gemini better, more useful for everyone. But I think that is a line that a lot of people don't feel comfortable with. The reason behind all of this is that Gmail needs a lot of new features to power its Gemini AI. We've seen just Gemini 3.0 come out recently. It's got a lot of incredible features in there. They're trying to help it become more faster. They want it to be able to manage your entire inbox more efficiently. And to do that, they need real email content. And they also need attachments, right? They need to understand not just what's inside of an email, but you know, like how, what attachments and other things are kind of attached to it as they're, as they're working on getting Gemini to completely manage your email system, and to not just train, but also refine their AI models.

3:26So a lot of users are now reporting that because of this, there are settings that are switched on by default, which are instead of just explicitly asking you to opt in. And this is where I would say I'd probably call it out. sure if gmail is like hey can you switch on the settings so we can like uh read and all your stuff and train on it um if that's cool with you and then we'll you know give you access to the best uh gemini model if that's what people want to do fine that's great i do not like it when these models by default switch stuff on i've seen this happen a couple other times um google is a culprit frequently but there's others as well i think if you don't manually turn these off your private messages might be used for ai training behind the scenes and even though google promises like Google's not just like, hey, we're going to take your emails and now everyone in the world is going to read them.

4:10Like, that's not what they're saying in their terms. They promise really strong privacy measures. They have anonymization. They have data security during AI training for anyone handling sensitive or confidential information. But even with all of that, I think a lot of people don't feel very reassured. So, yes, your Gmail experience is going to get smarter and more personalized if you turn this on. but features like predictive text and AI powered writing assistance need this kind of data so is it worth the risks I think there's plenty of reasons why you could be uncomfortable and yes all of the features that they're adding make Gmail smarter and more personalized but I think the lack of explicit consent to me feels like this is not the right way to go about doing this like I mentioned if you want to have someone like willingly choose it with a pop-up fantastic but But if you automatically opt them in, I think that's quite shady.

5:02So how do you opt out if you don't want this? And I'm going to be 100 % honest here. I'm going to explain how to opt out. Personally, I will probably leave myself opted in because opting out makes you lose access to certain features and being someone that works in the AI field and I want to see what's kind of the advancements and everything coming down the pipe. I'm probably going to leave this on. So I mean, maybe that's the maybe that's the shocking take. Now, if I worked in, you know, security, and I didn't care so much about the AI advances, but I really care about security, I'd probably turn it off.

5:32I don't know. So everyone will fall into different into different camps here. But here's how you turn it off. It essentially acquires requires you to change settings in two different places. The first thing that you do is you turn off smart features in Gmail chat and meeting settings, you basically go to you have to do on the desktop or mobile app, you click on the gear icon, see all settings, you go over to settings, and you you find there's a section called smart features. This is in Gmail chat and meet, you got to scroll down quite a bit to actually go find that. But inside of that smart features, you uncheck the option.

6:05So essentially, in what it's going to say, it's like, if you want to turn it back on, what Google says is turn on smart features in Gmail chat and meet when you turn on the setting, you agree to let Gmail chat and meet use your content and activity in these products to provide smart features and personalize your experience. Okay, and there's like a little learn more button where you can learn more about what it everything that's actually entailed and beyond just like we're using it to personalize. Okay, but they also like literally using it and training models with it. So there's that. Another thing you need to do is turn off Google Workspace smart features.

6:39So still inside of settings, you go to Google Workspace smart features, you click on manage workspace, smart features and settings, you're gonna see two options, smart features in Google Workspace and also smart features in other Google products. Both of those have to be toggled off, then you got to hit save for that actually to go into effect. Then you want to check if both of them are off, make sure all of the toggles remain off if you refresh it. Why are there two different places to go do this? Why is there not one toggle? Why do you have multiple places? Because Google separates workspace smart features, your email chat and meet with smart features used across all of the other apps.

7:14So to fully opt out of feeding your data into AI training, both of those have to be disabled. I will say your account might not show those settings enabled by default yet. I was looking at a report by someone who said that theirs did not. But if you care about security, I would double check on that. So I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I love all of the new AI features. And personally, I'm actually not going to disable this because I care more about the features and functionality than I do about the security aspect of things. so I'm going to keep using these settings but I know there's a lot of people who feel rubbed the wrong way by the fact that this was default opted in for a lot of people and they don't just don't want the smart features to begin with so if you fall into that camp this is what you can do about it overall I think I'm really excited about everything Google is doing not excited about getting opted in by default to having your data taken but this is kind of the nature of a lot of these AI companies and this isn't just Google there are so many companies that are having to do sneaky things where essentially they have access to massive data libraries.

8:17Gmail is probably one of the biggest. And they have a very tricky time is with security being able to find a way to monetize and actually use that data for AI. So they come up with these sneaky little opt in things, they add it, they change their terms of service and their privacy settings. And they probably made me at some point check a box that said I allow Google to change how they handle my data whenever they decide. And so like, technically, we're all opted into this stuff or we agreed to their terms of service. But still, that being said, I think you need to be transparent with your users when you're going to take their data.

8:49This doesn't just apply for Google. This is a lot of different companies that are sitting on massive piles of data. So this is an interesting problem that this is not the last time you're going to hear about. We will continue struggling with this problem forever, essentially, now that AI is worth so much money. All right. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. I hope you enjoyed the show, and I hope that was useful to you. If it was, if you could do me a huge favor, leave a review on the podcast. It really helps more people like yourself, amazing people find the show and it helps me in the algorithm, on the charts, all of that kind of stuff.

9:22The reviews really make a big difference. I read them all. I appreciate them all. Hope you guys all have a fantastic rest of your day and make sure to go check out AIbox.ai for all of the best AI models, $20 a month on one platform. All right, talk to you later.