If You Use Gmail, You’re Going To Want To Turn Off This 1 Automatic Setting ASAP

Another day, another “feature” opens in a load-bearing application and you might want to turn it off.

For Gmail users, there is an auto-opt-in feature that could allow Google to access your email data (eg: your personal and work messages, your attachments) “to train artificial intelligence models,” cybersecurity experts say. If you don’t want this information shared, you’ll need to adjust your settings.

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“This is an important message for anyone who uses Gmail. You have automatically chosen to allow Gmail to access all of your private messages and attachments in order to train the AI ​​model,” engineer Dave Jones shared on X earlier this week. “You must manually turn off smart features in the settings menu in both locations.”

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In companies’ race to achieve ROI in AI, we’re already seeing language learning models running out of new human-generated data to train on. As The Huffington Post previously reported, tools like AI assistants that automatically take notes on meetings have been cited as opportunities to passively harvest data from users in work settings. (Even boring company meetings are not immune!)

“Google uses information to improve our services and develop new products, features, and technologies that benefit our users and the public. For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google’s artificial intelligence models and build products and features such as Google Translate, Gemini Apps, and cloud artificial intelligence capabilities,” according to the company’s privacy policy.

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It is worth noting that according to Bloomberg, a class action lawsuit has been proposed against Google. According to the complaint, users claim the company “secretly” uses Gemini to “access and exploit the entire recorded history of its users’ private communications, including every email and attachment sent and received in their Gmail account.”

Google did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s questions about the process for opting users in and out of the features or about the class action lawsuit. A Google spokesperson told The Huffington Post via email that the reports were “misleading,” noting that “Gmail intelligence features have been around for years, and we don’t use your Gmail content to train our Gemini AI models.” The spokesperson added: “We are always transparent and clear if we make changes to our terms of service and policies.”

However, if you still want more control over how AI is used in your life (Pew Research Center reports that 6 in 10 Americans share this concern), here’s some good news: You can turn it off.

Read on to learn how.

Turn off Gmail’s AI training opt-in

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To turn off this feature, you need to open settings and manually opt out in two different locations.

On the desktop, you can go to Settings (the little cog in the upper right corner) and look at the “General” tab. There you can make your first opt-out and deselect “Smart Features”

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Next, you click on “Manage Workplace smart feature settings” (pictured above), which takes you to a second popup where you can turn features on and off in Google Workspace and other Google products.

Opting out of the former will turn off the Ask a Gemini feature that summarizes content, as well as personalized searches and events that are automatically added to emails in your calendar.

The latter will get you out of showing restaurant reservations and takeout orders in Maps, using suggested tickets or loyalty cards in Wallet, and answers, reminders, and suggestions from the Google Assistant and Gemini apps.

If you’re using a mobile device, you can change these settings by going to the Settings page (at the bottom of the inbox menu) and selecting “Data Privacy.” From there, you can turn off Smart Features and then click on the “Google Workspace Smart Features” menu to turn off features for Workspace and Google products again.

One annoying part of this is that some of the useful Gmail features we’ve grown accustomed to will be removed by opting out. Features like Smart Compose and the ability to automatically filter emails into Promotions and Social inboxes, and even features like spell check, grammar check, and autocorrect, are currently tied to Gemini opt-ins.

Therefore, when you choose not to share your information, you may want to consider whether you are prepared to lose certain functionality in exchange. You may want to read your email more carefully.

But for many people who care about their privacy, this is better than letting other things be done.

This article was originally published on Huffington Post.

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