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Gmail users warned to opt out of new feature - what we know
(www.newsweek.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2025
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I'm not seeing where any of this gives Google permission to train AI using your data. As far as I can see it's all about using AI to manage your data, which is a completely different thing. The word "training" appears to originate in Dave Jones' tweet, not in any of the Google pages being quoted. Is there any confirmation that this is actually happening, and not just a social media panic?
The only option is smart features, on or off. That requires Google to read the email to categorize them and do a lot of basic stuff. It doesn't let you narrowly have more privacy on specific features. It's all or nothing, and if you get a lot of emails then it's hard to turn it off if you already use categories. Google always does all or nothing because they know people need some of it, same with location. It has to be precise location tracking to use things, you can't just do rough location.
Yes, but the point is that granting Google permission to manage your data by AI is a very different thing from training the AI on your data. You can do all the things you describe without also having the AI train on the data, indeed it's a hard bit of extra work to train the AI on the data as well.
If the setting isn't specifically saying that it's to let them train AI on your data then I'm inclined to believe that's not what it's for. They're very different processes, both technically and legally. I think there's just some click-baiting going on here with the scary "they're training on your data!" Accusation, it seems to be baseless.
Understand that basically ANYTHING that "uses AI" is using you for training data.
At its simplest, it is the old fashioned A/B testing where you are used as part of a reinforcement/labeling pipeline. Sometimes it gets considerably more bullshit as your very queries and what would make you make them are used to "give you a better experience" and so forth.
And if you read any of the EULAs (for the stuff that google opted users into...) you'll see verbiage along those lines.
Of course, the reality is that google is going to train off our data regardless. But that is why it is a good idea to decouple your life from google as much as possible. It takes a long ass time but... no better time than today.
Not that I've seen, no.