New AI features are making their way to your Gmail inbox. Here's how to turn off Gemini in Gmail and why you should.
  • In your Gmail app, go to Settings.
  • Select your Gmail address.
  • Clear the Smart features checkbox.
  • Go to Google Workspace smart features.
  • Clear the checkboxes for: Smart features in Google Workspace, Smart features in other Google products
  • If you have more Gmail accounts, repeat these steps for each one.
  • Turning off Gemini in Gmail also disables basic, long-standing features like spellchecking, which predate AI assistants. This design choice discourages opting out and shows how valuable your AI-processed data is for Google.

This has finally gotten me to take steps to deGoogle my email, Fastmail trial underway.

  • Womble@piefed.worldEnglish
    5·
    13 hours ago

    Google promises(new window) that Gmail’s 3 billion users will benefit from a “personal, proactive inbox assistant”. But given that these features are free, what’s the catch? Make no mistake, Google isn’t doing this out of generosity. The contents of your inbox are valuable to the company.

    Email used to be a more private space where your communications could potentially be intercepted by bad actors, but largely your data was your own.

    I dont think that is true wrt gmail is it? Google have been scanning your messages and using that for machine learning based ad targeting since it was released.

    • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      5 hours ago

      I don’t think they meant Gmail used to be private, but email. Yes, Gmail has never been private. But, that’s why it’s free.

      • Womble@piefed.worldEnglish
        2·
        4 hours ago

        That doesn’t make any sense as a reason to turn off Gemini in your inbox though. Either you are ok with having your emails scanned and used in ML systems, in which case why bother turning off the feature; or you aren’t and turning off the feature doesn’t help you.

        • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
          2·
          4 hours ago

          Oh, I completely agree. Using Gmail is the problem here, and no amount of settings fiddling will solve that.