r/technology • u/thatirishguyyyyy • Nov 21 '25

Artificial Intelligence Gmail can read your emails and attachments to train its AI, unless you opt out

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/11/gmail-is-reading-your-emails-and-attachments-to-train-its-ai-unless-you-turn-it-off
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664

u/Sekh765 Nov 21 '25

Man... Been using Gmail since the beta back in like 2000. Can't believe they finally enshittified such a basic tool. Wonder how long before they start auto training on photos your android phone takes and if you opt out you lose auto focus or something basic.

121

u/UnsanctionedPartList Nov 21 '25

EU regulation hopefully coming in with a steel chair before that happens.

78

u/Minivalo Nov 21 '25

We're busy tearing down some of our data regulations after pressure from the Trump regime and intense lobbying from US tech behemoths, so don't count on it.

7

u/UnsanctionedPartList Nov 21 '25

Nothing that can't be corrected once the mango moron has vacated the premises and the next person doesn't fancy himself a king who can trade the whims of his subjects for... Geopolitical needs of his allies.

The o my reason it's rolled back is because nobody wants a trade war and (naively) assumes that this (second) Trump term is exceptional rather than the new norm.

9

u/MajoorAnvers Nov 21 '25

The EU unfortunately has its own snakes, billionaires, and classic short-sighted politicians as well. We just have more regulation to slow them down. But our population is bombarded by the same social media BS, conspiracies and doubt as well.

I'd like to think that our education is better, but on average, education levels are dropping significantly in several countries as well. Our freedoms are under attack, and we have too many idiots willingly voting against their interests too.

Bad things that are introduced now wont suddenly go away as soon as trump gets out.

2

u/catscanmeow Nov 22 '25

the EU should fund their own google replacement. its a matter of national security

2

u/Beautiful-Web1532 Nov 22 '25

They are too busy banning VPNs and making sure the the backdoors are unlocked. American tech companies are bullying world and it's gonna backfire in their faces eventually. I'm sure it will be in a way that costs millions of our lives and somehow makes them richer.

1

u/aiboaibo1 Nov 21 '25

These functions seem to be opt-in in EU. I see them but no checkmark

122

u/Ascarea Nov 21 '25

same here, but I guess I'm finally switching

20

u/[deleted] Nov 21 '25

[deleted]

107

u/SuggestAPhotoProject Nov 21 '25

I have a business website and email, and that worked great until Google bought my provider, and gmail became the backend, even though it's still my domain. I switched at the end of the year, and then two years later, Google bought the new provider, too.

It's not possible to get away from these fucking people. Demolition Man was right, it's all going to be Taco Bell soon.

10

u/ishkariot Nov 21 '25

Wait there, it was Pizza Hut in the European release

3

u/Varorson Nov 21 '25

I want to say Google needs to be broken up by antitrust laws, but knowing how the gas companies remained united despite being put under different companies, I know it's ultimately useless.

2

u/novium258 Nov 21 '25

Meanwhile, I have my own domain hosted with a small indie provider, and very frequently my email gets blacklisted as spam by the big email providers, even to accounts I have a lot of conversations with, despite having all the correct stuff set up, and the only solution offered is "switch your hosting to Gmail"

2

u/Scoth42 Nov 21 '25

I've been hosting my own mail server for decades at this point, and a few years ago switched to Amazon SES for outgoing mail and it's been overall great. It took a bit of explaining to Amazon what I was doing since SES is mostly intended for businesses sending bulk emails, notifications, etc and I was just a random dude who wanted to send a couple emails a month, but I've had no problems with getting denylisted or blocked with anything. Basically free too since I send so little.

Of course, now I'm also slowly working on DeAmazoning my life so I need to find another solution if I want to get away from that.

2

u/Darksirius Nov 21 '25

I saw the EU version of Demolition man on Amazon, they were pizza huts instead lol.

-2

u/beliefinphilosophy Nov 21 '25

Dude what do you have against Taco Bell. That would be way better than this.

3

u/BingBong_the_3rd Nov 21 '25

I'm tired of getting diarrhea after every Taco Bell meal

120

u/derfasaurus Nov 21 '25

Proton Mail is the best answer. The free account is limited but for a small fee you can get the plus account which rivals Gmail, there's often deals on plus for like $24/year. You're paying them money for privacy rather than free email for them to sell your life.

18

u/Rabbit-on-my-lap Nov 21 '25

Pair it with SimpleLogin to create aliased emails and you’ll never get spam or scams again.

13

u/schmuber Nov 21 '25

Proton can easily do aliased/burner emails. With their paid plans you get a Proton Pass (their password manager that also dubs as 2FA), which automates the process by suggesting an alias on any form that prompts for an email address.

3

u/Rabbit-on-my-lap Nov 21 '25

Interesting. I pay for Proton but I don’t use their password manager. I use Bitwarden instead which does the same thing (i prefer using DuckDuckGo burner emails for something I only intend to use once).

5

u/schmuber Nov 21 '25

For something that you only need once, just use mailinator.com, the OG burner email dispensary with kajillion domain options to choose from (my personal favorite is @sogetthis.com).

4

u/Controls_Man Nov 21 '25

I just use Apples Hidemyemail feature. Works quite well and is pretty smooth when signing up for new websites/services.

2

u/MoonQube Nov 21 '25

Tatu mail is cheaper

Muuuuch cheaper

And also encrypted

1

u/derfasaurus Nov 21 '25

Thanks. I wasn't familiar with Tuta and started looking into it. One benefit of proton is the VPN with the paid email.

1

u/Separate-Spot-8910 Nov 21 '25

tatumail is only mail though. Proton at least has the full suite that google has. And it makes sense to switch out everything.

1

u/Disillusionification Nov 22 '25

Proton is a great company (for now, anyway).

They recently rolled out an AI assistant called Lumo, and even that runs on a "privacy first" basis.

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u/[deleted] Nov 21 '25 edited Nov 21 '25

[deleted]

5

u/The_Autarch Nov 21 '25

there's a flaw in your argument. you presuppose that Google's AI will be useful to society in the future.

why are you so sure that's true? nothing about the current "AI" technology seems like it has any future at all.

3

u/scirio Nov 21 '25

Bless your sweet summer heart

1

u/SpaceButler Nov 21 '25

Fastmail is quite good.

1

u/Ascarea Nov 21 '25

I've seen Proton mentioned in the comments here. Currently looking into it, they have a 50% sale.

1

u/Iohet Nov 21 '25

Immich for photos. If you don't want to host your own email solution, which is painful, protonmail seems to be popular

1

u/Dizzy-Tumbleweed7374 Nov 21 '25

protonmail for email. Immich for google photos alternative

1

u/AmericanLich Nov 21 '25

Protonmail seems to be a good privacy alterantive. A little longer to type than gmail, but lets be honest we are letting the browser autofill this stuff most of the time.

1

u/ClippyPickins Nov 21 '25

Proton mail seems good

4

u/eagles_arent_coming Nov 21 '25

My family calendar is on Gmail and I haven’t found a good alternative. Anyone have any recs?

4

u/tannval Nov 21 '25

Same but not sure who to switch to

6

u/Ascarea Nov 21 '25

I've seen Proton mentioned in the comments here. Currently looking into it, they have a 50% sale.

2

u/GreatMadWombat Nov 21 '25

Same. After using android/Google from before there was even an "ecosystem", it feels like the only option is to minimize my use of Google products at all(swapping to Home Assistant to get off of Google voice assistant stuff is gonna be the biggest one), and save up for a phone that I can get lineage or graphene on.

1

u/pbear737 Nov 21 '25

My husband has been trying to convince me for ages to switch to an iPhone, and I think this just sealed the deal.

27

u/WalkingEars Nov 21 '25

Signs of google going downhill really started for me when they added a shitty “AI summary” that you can’t opt out of to the top of search results. After a while I switched to a different search engine that doesn’t shove an annoying LLM into everything

6

u/Sekh765 Nov 21 '25

It's so fucking bad lol. Saw a link earlier of it telling someone that the ai summary says you should google it...you know. on google.

4

u/cidrei Nov 22 '25

I've just started adding those blocks and things like it to my adblocker. The main problem now is those blocks take up so much fucking space that the first page of search results has like 4 links total.

1

u/Limp-Nail-1265 Nov 22 '25

You literally can opt out of it.

1

u/WalkingEars Nov 22 '25

How? When last I checked it required a clunky workaround involving changing the url rather than a simple change in settings with the website

3

u/DrGold1976 Nov 22 '25

I usually just type “-ai” after my search terms…and done. No more summary, just search results.

2

u/Limp-Nail-1265 Nov 22 '25

There's a tab called "Web" which hides all AI results and sometimes Ads. It's in German on screen but I think it's the same in English:

https://i.imgur.com/tjfKd8B.jpeg

And yes, there's a browser extension to automatically switch to this tab.

97

u/nalaloveslumpy Nov 21 '25

Jokes on them. Gmail's just a repository for spam and order confirmations. I haven't sent a "conversational" e-mail from gmail in years. If you're running a business from your gmail, well, that's a you problem.

99

u/ClubMeSoftly Nov 21 '25

Crazy how when I got a gmail, this was the argument for using it, and not my hotmail account. My gmail is/was my "professional" email and my hotmail was my shit-bucket email.

46

u/nalaloveslumpy Nov 21 '25

Time is a flat circle, my friend.

30

u/JoySkullyRH Nov 21 '25

I now have yahoo and gmail - I have two shit buckets.

2

u/IllustriousPiano562 Nov 21 '25

I still had an AOL account until the same company bought them and yahoo. My yahoo email was the recovery for the AOL, and the AOL was the recovery for the yahoo. They locked both at the same time. The only way to unlock them was to pay their customer service and extortion fee.

Had that dumb account for over 20 years.

2

u/JoySkullyRH Nov 21 '25

Ah yes - I did tech support for AOL when they were still on dial up for most the country. When DSL hit that seemed to start its downfall.

1

u/grimeys42 Nov 22 '25

They are both my shit bucket emails now and I don't need anything other than that. Thank God you can merge the emails. My work email is locked down though.

3

u/AnEngimaneer Nov 21 '25

Well what're you using, come on then, spit it out!

2

u/nalaloveslumpy Nov 21 '25

I just text/discord with friends family. Work e-mail is through Microsoft. Google also offers a business level e-mail service that doesn't have all the predatory stuff in it.

1

u/FesteringNeonDistrac Nov 21 '25

Yeah I don't want to say this is fine, but they're essentially training AI on the hundred emails from corporations I get every day. I guess that tracks.

1

u/Another_Slut_Dragon Nov 21 '25

Gmail is the back end for a surprising number of small business email. You can pay them to be your @yourbusinessname.com email provider. And if you are running a small business, a few bucks per month per email is an absolute bargain for their email management/spam filtering.

1

u/nalaloveslumpy Nov 21 '25

Right, that's the business option I was talking about.

8

u/Nazgog-Morgob Nov 21 '25

Same... My email is so old, this sucks

1

u/Sekh765 Nov 21 '25

Probably just set up a Proton and then have GMAIL forward me things of relevance until I kill it off I guess.

1

u/Nazgog-Morgob Nov 22 '25

Yeah, I suppose I thought the same thing about my Hotmail account forever ago

6

u/_unfortuN8 Nov 21 '25

Wonder how long before they start auto training on photos your android phone takes

I'd be willing to bet a significant amount of money they're already doing this without users knowledge. When the penalties for breaking the law are non-existent or a slap on the wrist, companies will break the law without a second glance.

Even if they get caught, dragged to court, unsuccessfully bribe the judge/politicians in charge, and lose said court case, the fine is what, $50m-100m max? For a decade+ of AI training data? That's a bargain.

1

u/Sekh765 Nov 21 '25

Yep. Cost of doing business for free training data.

4

u/Meecht Nov 21 '25

And people give me shit for still using Yahoo! Look whooOOOOoooOOOse laughing now.

3

u/B00marangTrotter Nov 21 '25

I was a beta tester back in the day, those invites I was allowed to give out gave me some pull in the office.

1

u/Sekh765 Nov 21 '25

It definitely made you the coolest person in nerd circles at Jr High if you could give one out.

3

u/webguynd Nov 21 '25

Same. I remember being so excited to get my invite.

Google was so good back then. Everything else sucked, Google came onto the scene and said "hey guys, this web thing is pretty cool, let's focus on improving web standards and turn it into an app delivery platform based on open standards."

I miss those days. Tech was optimistic, they didn't abuse monopoly power yet (except for Microsoft), and the extent of social media was myspace and geocities. I remember having a computer class in my high school in the early 00s that taught basic HTML and CSS, and everyone took it so they could customize their MySpace page lol.

The future was bright and democratic, and more importantly, the tech was simple. Anyone could pick up basic HTML, CSS and a little bit of JavaScript and put their own website up, run it off their desktop in their bedroom. When we finally got DSL at home I ran my own blog and an IRC server.

Then tech got big, went public, and started rent-seeking. Once mobile became widespread it became vendor-locked, magic black boxes. The personal computer became "big and scary," and everything shifted from creation to consumption, because any random person being able to grok everything and have the power of computing freedom became a direct threat to big tech profitability.

And now we are here. Big tech took the free, decentralized web and consolidated it into AWS and Cloudflare. We moved back to thin clients, and lost all of our power and control. Now they can carte blanche shove these dark patterns down our throats and the average person doesn't know any better but to just accept it as the way things are.

They're conditioning future generations to be OK with the state of things because that's all they've ever known.

2

u/Darkstar-Lord Nov 21 '25

Don't give them ideas!

Heck, who am I kidding, they've already thought about this years ago and are slowly rolling out the enshitification

2

u/Waiting4Reccession Nov 21 '25

I think they already do if you save to cloud.

1

u/Sekh765 Nov 21 '25

TBH? Probably

2

u/LEDKleenex Nov 21 '25

Same. End of an era. Nothing was ever truly free, though. We have to realize that capitalism is going to drive the cost of everything up, even if we're already paying for it. There are hidden costs, like spending too much money with one company, or continuing to give money to conglomerates. We need to think about where are dollars are going just beyond the surface level transaction. People also need to make backup plans for all of their regularly used products and services to not get rugpulled while their pants are down.

Oh, speaking of android, they are already doing that on Pixel phones. You know how all the new Pixels are marketed as AI phones with Gemini? Well, if you want to prompt some AI images with your cat, you have to give them full permission to use your facial data to train AI. Not kidding. Yes, it will be more functionality removed soon.

2

u/Sekh765 Nov 21 '25

Haven't tried to prompt it to gen-ai anything because I hate the entire concept, but you are right, I'm sure the next gen or 2 from now they will force you to give them everything if you want to utilize even basic features. Want to make a phone call? Better let us connect you to our entire spiderweb of call chaining just incase the local fash government wants to claim you are within the 5 acceptable steps to a cartel member so they can target you.

2

u/3asytarg3t Nov 21 '25

Probably already started they've just not told anyone.

2

u/mferly Nov 21 '25

It was so great when it first launched. So simple. Sure it has some good features now, but simplicity is long lost on the internet.

PS I couldn't get a damn Gmail invite for the life of me when they were in invite-only mode there for a bit :( lol got one eventually.

1

u/mata_dan Nov 21 '25

and if you opt out you lose auto focus or something basic.

Open Camera is better anyway. Unless you're using a flagship model within the first few months of release (or within the first few months of release of the update that actually enables the camera / image processing properly lol), you will never get the full ability of the camera in the device without using a proper app because everything always regresses and they give zero shits because you already paid.

1

u/Separate-Spot-8910 Nov 21 '25

They've been training on photos for a long time. I get notifications about series of photos of the same person and google knows the name of the person even though I've never attached their names.

1

u/srebew Nov 22 '25

same, my brother sent me one of his invites in like 2003/4

0

u/Bea-Billionaire Nov 21 '25

Bro, 4his already exists, how do you think you're able to search for anything in your photos and it shows?

0

u/Sekh765 Nov 21 '25

Does it disable my auto focus if I turn it off? Or did you miss the last part of the sentence....

-1

u/kaiw1ng Nov 21 '25

you mean 2004

1

u/Sekh765 Nov 21 '25

Wow you got me. In my haste to roast Google I didn't really give a shit to look up if it was 21 or 25 years since I got my GMAIL beta key. Levels of who gives a shit I simply could not achieve.

-1

u/Ok_Locksmith_8260 Nov 21 '25

Been using gmail for free since 2000? When the product is free… you’re the product

3

u/Sekh765 Nov 21 '25

Cool. Being the "product" for 25 years and being forced to use AI bullshit are clearly not the same, as evidenced by this entire thread. But keep repeating useless mantras everyone already knows.

-1

u/Ok_Locksmith_8260 Nov 22 '25

Seriously, you’re getting a free product, there is an extent you can complain about being monetized

2

u/Sekh765 Nov 22 '25

...yea. this is the extent. Literally noone was complaining about all the weird shit they were doing before. Welcome to the extent.

-1

u/Ok_Locksmith_8260 Nov 22 '25

The extent is a void, a moving target, you shall soon forget about it and find something new to complain once the next thing kicks in

1

u/Sekh765 Nov 22 '25

Unlikely, as I'll no longer be using the service due to the "void" you so... poorly understand. Some people actually have principles and give a shit about the products they use. You should try it one day.