Everyone 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. The way that they went about this, I don't feel like it's very straightforward or transparent, so I'm going to call it 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 a lot of information from and sharing today on the podcast.
Before we get into that, if you want to get access to all of the AI models I talk about here, including Gemini, Grock, Claude, OpenAI, and every other major model, whether it's text, audio, image, go check out mystartup AIbox.ai. There's a link in the description. You get access to all 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. If 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 assistants, 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, 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, and Google's like, well, we want to make Gemini better and 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 people to manage their entire inbox more efficiently, and to do that, they need real email content, and they also need attachments. They need to understand not just what's inside of an email, but what attachments and other things are kind of attached to it as they're working on getting Gemini to completely manage your email system, and to not just train, but also refine their AI models.
So 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's like, hey, can you switch on the settings so we can read and tell your stuff and train on it, if that's cool with you, and then we'll give you access to the best 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.
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. Like, 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 assistants need this kind of data, so is it worth the risk? 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 if you automatically opt them in, I think that's quite shady. So 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 shocking take. You can actually 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 it on the desktop or mobile app.
You click on the gear icon, see all settings, you go over to settings, and you find there's a section called smart features. This is in Gmail chat and meet. You've got to scroll down quite a bit to actually go find that, but inside of that smart features, you uncheck the option. So essentially, what it's going to say is 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 everything that's actually impaled beyond just like, we're using it to personalize, but they're 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.
So still inside of settings, you go to Google workspace smart features. You click on manage workspace smart features and settings. You're going to 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've got to hit save for that actually to go into effect. Then you want to check if both of them are off and 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? 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. This isn't just Google. There are so many companies that are having to sneaky things where essentially they have access to massive data libraries. Gmail is probably one of the biggest.
And they have a very tricky time with security being able to find a way to monetize and actually use that data for AI. So they found out these sneaky little opt-in things. They added, they changed 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 technically we're all opted into this stuff where 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. This 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 in to the podcast today. I hope you enjoyed the show. And I hope that was useful to you.
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