Lauren WeinsteinJul 17, 2025

WARNING: #GOOGLE IS TRYING TO TRICK YOU INTO USING GEMINI AI AND FEEDING GEMINI YOUR DATA IN GMAIL AND OTHER APPS!

What Google is now doing should be ILLEGAL. PERIOD. For the first time I can recall in history of using Gmail, it just now popped a modal dialogue box -- DEMANDING that I choose whether or not I wanted "Smart Features" turned on -- which when you read the verbiage mostly means goddamned Gemini AI AND if you enable this you're giving Google permission to use your data to "improve" this horrifically invasive, inept, and misinformation spewing tech that steals data from websites for its own use without permission of those sites. DON'T LET IT SUCK IN YOUR EMAIL AS WELL!

There was no way I could find to exit the modal window without choosing YES or NO, which means my existing selection to NOT use Gmail Smart Features (long my preference) was NOT being honored. After saying NO to this disgusting query by Google, I was pushed to ANOTHER page where I was forced to choose again about "smart features" in "other" Google apps. I chose NO again and finally was permitted to escape this trap.

Note that while you can fairly easily check to make sure "smart features" are turned off in Gmail settings, I offhand don't have a clue as to how to find the similar settings in other Google apps that may have been affected by this absolutely disrespectful forced dialogue, as Google keeps trying to ram Gemini AI down our throats.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! Google has become a DISGRACE.

#Google #Gmail #Gemini #AI

Show threadBSM (sw.s) 🇨🇭

@lauren Google has been reading your emails for as long as Gmail has existed (and used it to train their AI), and now that they're introducing Gemini, you're complaining?! The mistake began when you first started using Gmail.

There is only one way to solve this: Leave Google/Gmail behind!

Jul 17, 2025 at 6:19amWeb
Show threadLauren WeinsteinJul 17, 2025
@bsm You are conflating different systems. Unless you've worked inside Google, as I have, you may not have as precise an understanding of these systems as I do. There is a BIG difference between the systems that have traditionally scanned Gmail for malware, spam, and (until it stopped serving context targeted ads), targeted ad placements -- vis-a-vis a general purpose LLM like Gemini operating across a range of products. At least according to my current information, Gemini has not been trained on Gmail except as disclosed to various classes of Gmail users (e.g. enterprise -- and that is indeed a controversial situation relating to defaults). But the push of this into the consumer Gmail side now is a major escalation because most users do not understand the implications.
Show threadFloJul 17, 2025
@lauren @bsm the implications aren’t that different, we had exactly the same invasion of privacy debate in 2004 when they served ads based on the content of your email. Either you trust Google to honor their terms of service, or you don’t.
Show threadLauren WeinsteinJul 17, 2025
@faz @bsm I've never seen evidence (either externally or when I had the opportunity internally) that Google knowingly violates their ToS. There has always been a great deal of public hyperbole regarding Google that did not conform to reality -- especially regarding ads. However, what we're seeing now falls more into the category of "dark patterns" which do not necessarily violate the ToS but are unethical nonetheless.