On Thursday, November 20th, after panic-inducing claims that Google was using people’s Gmail messages to train its Gemini AI went viral, Google is defending itself and telling the media to correct the record.
Google denied the claims, explaining that concerns about Gmail’s “smart features” were misconceived and that Gmail users’ emails are not used to train Google’s Gemini AI. The site that made the original claim also retracted its claim and admitted that its original interpretation was incorrect.
what the hell happened
The origin of the commotion was malware byte The response from Google was quick, but not quick enough to prevent the claim from spreading online. A day is a digital eternity.
Google spokeswoman Jenny Thomson said: The Verge November 21, 2025: “These reports are misleading. We don’t change anyone’s settings, Gmail smart features have been around for many years, and we don’t use your Gmail content to train our Gemini AI models.”
malware bytes Gmail has since updated the article: “We’ve updated this article after realizing that recent changes to the wording and placement of smart features in Gmail have sparked a perfect storm of misunderstandings.
“While the setting itself is not new, the way Google recently rewrote and published it has led many people (including us) to believe that Gmail content is being used to train Google’s AI models and that users are automatically opted in. After digging into Google’s documentation and reviewing other reports, that doesn’t appear to be the case.”
“Gmail scans email content to power its own ‘smart features,’ such as filtering spam, categorizing, and making suggestions. However, this is part of how Gmail normally works and is not the same as training Google’s generative AI models.”
Google says smart features are opt-in by default and will be disabled if you take no action to enable them, so no one can use them without your knowledge. malware byte claims that “users’ experiences appear to vary depending on when and how they see the new language.”
