Google denies 'misleading' reports of Gmail using your emails to train AI

https://www.theverge.com/news/826902/gmail-ai-training-data-opt-out

by causenad • 8 months ago

63 57 8 months ago

agluszak• 8 months ago

Enabling the feature in Workspace says that “you agree to let Google Workspace use your Workspace content and activity to personalize your experience across Workspace,” according to the settings page, but according to Google, that does not mean handing over the content of your emails to use for AI training.

Google be like: "trust me bro"

simonw2• 8 months ago

User-facing software is full of language like that these days and I find it really frustrating, because it never helps answer the questions attentive people actually have, like will that mean my emails get dumped into the next Gemini training run?

svat• 8 months ago

Maybe my brain has rotted from paying a bit more attention to privacy language than the average person, but IMO in this case it's fairly clear to me that using your activity “to personalize your experience across Workspace” does not mean using it for training Gemini. The “personalize” means it's for training the recommendation/categorization systems for you, like which emails get marked as "important" or not (the settings at https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/inbox).

(In some very broad sense I guess critics could call this “training AI” as there's an ML system somewhere whose parameters associated with your account get updated, but I think we can all agree this is not what we think of as “training AI”, i.e. going into a cross-user dataset for training Gemini or whatever.)

(I guess what Google should do, and should have done years/decades ago, is create a fixed set of categories of how your data can be used (aggregate statistics, training Gemini, personalization…) and use the same language across products, legal, everything.)

criddell• 8 months ago

If you are using Google Workspace you decided to trust them a while ago.

mrweasel• 8 months ago

Maybe circumstances have changed? I certainly trusted 2008 Google a lot more than Google in 2025. It's really amazing to see a company just throw trust and goodwill out the window, even worse to see that it pays.

Ferret7446• 8 months ago

It sounds like you have some serious knowledge gaps about AI. It's perfectly normal to use AI on a dataset without incorporating that dataset into training a new AI model. If you download a free model and run it offline on your data, your data doesn't get magically incorporated into the model on the site you originally downloaded it from.

This is the same thing, and it's backed by a contract and the threat of lawsuits from the many businesses using Google Workspace.

ljlolel• 8 months ago

Some people worked on this. They don’t train on it directly. They use AI to rewrite the content “privacy-safe” then train on that….

LightBug1• 8 months ago

That sounds very "privacy safe" ...

jsnell• 8 months ago

Do you have any kind of source for that, or did you just make it up? If the latter, why?

rvz• 8 months ago

So they *do* train on your emails then.

Ok.

konart• 8 months ago

Poor AI, reading all those ad emails...

NebulaStorm4562• 8 months ago

I am wondering can we use LLMs to semantically encrypt our emails so that if I am talking about my startup strategy, to the person snooping or NSA it will appear as if we are talking about recipes.

NebulaStorm4562• 8 months ago

We're proposing semantic steganography using LLMs as encoder/decoder pairs where startup strategy discussions appear as recipe exchanges. Unlike traditional crypto, security emerges from semantic complexity rather than mathematical hardness - the LLM maps between concept spaces (e.g., "fermentation time" ↔ "development cycles") using its world model. Both parties share a seed phrase that deterministically generates the same bidirectional mapping, eliminating key exchange over insecure channels. The core insight: natural language is already an encoder (concepts → symbols), so we're just adding a second semantic layer that looks like normal Layer-1 communication to observers. Main challenges are LLM non-determinism requiring error correction and the tradeoff between information density and plausibility. The approach essentially weaponizes the LLM's semantic understanding to create a regenerable codebook rather than storing/transmitting it.

tietjens• 8 months ago

The only reason I am still using gmail is due to choice paralysis. I do not know which email service to choose and pay for. I do not like Proton. Is Fastmail the way to go? There is also the German one posteo. Should I just use Apple's mail? I'm taking suggestions if you have anything to share.

marbletiles• 8 months ago

Fastmail is the way. These are people for whom email is their job and focus and you get everything that comes with that, including good and responsive customer service.

tokai• 8 months ago

But their servers are in the US.

bwg2000• 8 months ago

Another vote for Fastmail. Cannot fault, and honestly a joy to use (if that’s possible checking your email).

dontlaugh2• 8 months ago

The first step is to get your own domain. You can set that up in Apple Mail at first if it’s most convenient. Then you can get everything moved over.

After that it’s much easier to move provider again.

john01dav• 8 months ago

How often do big providers like Gmail, customers of whom you will want to communicate with, eat the emails? I know that this is common if you run your own email server, and often just gone and not even to spam.

Google would probably justify this as security, and not necessarily unreasonably, but it has a clear anti-competitive effect too. The security concerns would be more credible if they made it easy to debug this, like giving a useful error message back to the sender stating what the missing security criteria are and having a clear process for appeals (like if you got unlucky with an IP address, or if you are missing a specific security measure on your domain).

robinhoodexe• 8 months ago

I've been using mailbox.org for 5 years and like it very much. Cost some 3 EUR per month (actually there's a 50% discount this week).

Dead simple email that just works. Their webUI is fine, but I almost exclusively use it on iOS or macOS with the default mail app. They also have some other features (calendar, office suite, video calls) that I don't use. I really like the option to create up to 25 email aliases.

wowamit2• 8 months ago

I was always afraid to switch from Gmail, knowing the impact it would have. But I switched to Fastmail this year and my experience has been comparatively frictionless. My fear was unfounded.

causenad• 8 months ago

That's great info. I need some encouragement to make the switch

robin_reala• 8 months ago

I’m happy with https://soverin.net/ – they’re EU based, reasonably priced, and I only use them with external clients anyway.

lionkor2• 8 months ago

I use fastmail for my and my family's mail, with many domains. It works fantastically, the android app and web app are very good, and it allows any settings, forwarding, clients, automation that I could think of.

The other features (files, file sharing, calendar) are also well designed and get out of your way.

Angostura• 8 months ago

I'm an iCloud+ subscriber and have moved a couple of my e-mail addresses across to use Apple's servers (about a year ago) for 'free'.

So far, it has worked consistently with no problems. The only annoyance is iyt doesn't seem that you can break multiple icloud-hosted mailboxes out into their own GUI mailboxes in the Mail client - they all get dumped into a Mailbox called 'Cloud'

Hard_Space• 8 months ago

Fastmail; I moved nearly three years ago, and never regretted it. If you can stand the five-eyes aspect, of course.

Also, I use its under-publicized 10GB of free space (i.e., additional to the 10GB of mail space allowance) to more than comfortably host LDAP data such as my Joplin data, and Floccus bookmarks.

rpicard• 8 months ago

I’ve been happy with hey.com. No plans on switching.

Mashimo• 8 months ago

There is also another German: mailbox.org

Congrats, you have more choices now :P

I have positive experience with both posteo and mailbox.org.

sneak2• 8 months ago

Proton is bad because of the need to use custom clients.

wiether• 8 months ago

If you want Swiss but without the fancy marketing claims of Proton, have a look at Infomaniak.

They are to me the most legit alternative to Google Workspace/Office 365, run on their own infra and they've been here forever.

pona-a• 8 months ago

I'm on Migadu. They are quite cheap, offer a student discount, support multiple domains, offer a very neat snappy UI, and have an extremely responsive support.

paxiongmap• 8 months ago

I've been on Fastmail with my own domains for 4 years now, having been fully Gmail since 2004. The transition was seemless, the apps are solid and I can't imagine ever going back. The only option I'd consider would be full self-hosting, but I really can't justify the effort to maintain the one service where I need very high uptime.

wowamit2• 8 months ago

With so many settings spread across multiple sections, especially in Workspace accounts, it's challenging to keep track of how existing settings are affected by each new addition. I generally review these regularly, yet find surprises now and then.

Knowing what setting does what in Gmail is becoming difficult by the day.

dwroberts2• 8 months ago

When you disable all of these features, eventually it turns off email categorisation.

At first this was annoying to me because it’s obviously a very good feature. But the last few weeks have been quite revealing: I’ve been receiving and unsubscribing from tons of emails I had no idea I even received regularly, because categories buried them away.

I wonder how much of newsletter marketing (and paid email marketing) is being propped up by the GMail categories just silently ingesting tons of stuff that people never read or see (but also never unsubscribe from)

sofixa2• 8 months ago

I wonder how much of newsletter marketing (and paid email marketing) is being propped up by the GMail categories just silently ingesting tons of stuff that people never read or see (but also never unsubscribe from)

I don't know, gmail regularly tells me "you haven't opened an email from XYZ newsletter in a while, do you want to unsubscribe?", with a direct button to do so.

Taek• 8 months ago

It does? I have never once seen this in my life.

dwroberts2• 8 months ago

I’ve never had this notification before. I get the direct unsubscribe button if I actually view the email, but not a warning I’m not reading them

Helmut10001• 8 months ago

I found the categorization feature distracting anyway because I read all my emails and always had to click through several tabs to see them.

islon• 8 months ago

Exactly the same for me. I unsubscribed from more newsletters in the past few days then in the last couple years.

gessha• 8 months ago

What’s annoying is some newsletters don’t respect the unsubscribe action and continue pumping the spam.

Cthulhu_• 8 months ago

I feel like the same thing happened 20 years ago when gmail was introduced and the words were "Google reads your emails to serve you ads".

sneak2• 8 months ago

Interestingly, “we do not use your Gmail content for training our Gemini AI model” (what they said) does not mean the same thing as “we don’t use your Gmail content to train AI” (what was asserted).

Anyone using Gmail and expecting it to be private or not leveraged against them is a fool.

DANmode• 8 months ago

We use everyone’s email content to train a different model that Gemini is friends with!

trubadors• 8 months ago

Who cares? I'm happy with Tuta Mail, they said they won't join the AI bandwaggon.

PapaPalpatine• 8 months ago

Well I don’t care that you’re on Tuta Mail.

josefritzishere• 8 months ago

Google is making both the comunications and the AI disable as arcane as might be legally defensible. They know what they are doing is wrong, so they are setting up their future legal argument for the inevitable class action lawsuit.

retrochameleon• 8 months ago

The fact that Gmail doesn't allow you to customize or expand your categories beyond the 4 it gives you frustrate me beyond belief. That, and the fact that there are countless examples of email sources that no matter how many times you move it to the category you want and tell it to "send all emails from x to category from now on," it continues to fail to filter them unless you make your own filter. And then managing the filters is a pain in the ass with a UX that hasn't been updated for 15 years, and also their labeling system is stupid because selecting a parent label only shows you emails with that EXPLICIT label instead of including all children labels.

Google denies 'misleading' reports of Gmail using your emails to train AI

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