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Google denies 'misleading' reports of Gmail using your emails to train AI
- agluszak 10mo 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"
- criddell 10mo agoIf you are using Google Workspace you decided to trust them a while ago.
- mrweasel 10mo agoMaybe 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.
- simonw 10mo agoUser-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 10mo agoMaybe 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 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.)
- simonw 10mo agoI interpret it that way too, but my bigger problem is in explaining it to other people. I can't credibly point nervous users at that language and say "what this actually means is X", because there's too much vagueness and wiggle room built into the language that the companies publish.
- Ferret7446 10mo agoIt 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 10mo agoSome people worked on this. They don’t train on it directly. They use AI to rewrite the content “privacy-safe” then train on that….
- konart 10mo agoPoor AI, reading all those ad emails...
- NebulaStorm456 10mo agoI 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.
- NebulaStorm456 10mo agoWe'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 10mo agoThe 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.
- bwg2000 10mo agoAnother vote for Fastmail. Cannot fault, and honestly a joy to use (if that’s possible checking your email).
- marbletiles 10mo agoFastmail 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 10mo agoBut their servers are in the US.
- lionkor 10mo agoGDPR applies if you're in the EU regardless, but it would be nice to have it split like bitwarden[.eu].
- mikkupikku 10mo agoSo are the email servers used by the recipients of your emails, no? Almost everybody uses gmail, so even of you don't most of your email correspondence is going to end up, or originate from, on gmail servers anyway.
- krior 10mo agoPersonally I do not know the last time I wrote to a Gmail-adress, so depending on location and evironment avoiding US-mailservers may be possible.
- wowamit 10mo agoWith 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.
- dwroberts 10mo agoWhen 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)
- sofixa 10mo 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 10mo agoIt does? I have never once seen this in my life.
- sofixa 10mo agoMight be a mobile app / EU-based account only thing, but I've seen it numerous times and I'm almost certain I've seen it on the web version of Gmail too.
- ghc 10mo agoAmerican here. Seen it a number of times on both mobile and web.
- ghc 10mo agoThere's a pretty long waiting period before it does this. I'm not sure what the time required is, but I think it's at least 3 months. And it only does this if you don't interact with the newsletter at all. Just speculation, but it's possible if you also use a non-web/non-gmail-app client it might suppress these notifications.
- Cthulhu_ 10mo agoI 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".
- sneak 10mo agoInterestingly, “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 10mo agoWe use everyone’s email content to train a different model that Gemini is friends with!
- trubadors 10mo agoWho cares? I'm happy with Tuta Mail, they said they won't join the AI bandwaggon.
- PapaPalpatine 10mo agoWell I don’t care that you’re on Tuta Mail.
- josefritzishere 10mo agoGoogle 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 10mo agoThe 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.