For the banishment of all doubt, no, Google isn’t scraping the contents of your email inbox in order to train its AI models. However, that doesn’t mean Gmail is free of Gemini, and sooner or later you’ll need to decide your own personal boundaries with AI.
Google announced at the start of the year that Gmail would be entering the Gemini era. This ushered in AI overviews for your inbox, as well as the Help Me Write feature that allows floundering users to draft emails with AI assistance. Gemini is used to sift through all the data in your inbox in order to summarise information or give relevant insights.
These features have been available for some time now, but the presence of AI in your inbox may have caught your attention again recently due to viral posts such as this one from Shark Tank’s Lori Greiner (via Forbes). What you may have heard less about is ‘Personal Intelligence‘.
Personal Intelligence began to roll out around the same time as Gmail’s Smart features, and allows users to link Gemini to various Google apps, like Gmail, Google Photos, and YouTube. You could ask Gemini ‘Hey, why can’t I stop thinking about low-poly rats?’ and, in theory, Gemini could look through your YouTube watch history and messages, then say something like, ‘It’s because you rewatched Rat Movie: Mystery of the Mayan Treasure last week after your best friend sent it to you with the following caption: Rat squad 4 lyfe.’
Much like Gmail’s smart features, when personal intelligence is enabled Gemini can search through all of the personal data held by Google’s apps in order to answer your conversational queries. It can also scan all of your Google photos in order to “create more relevant, personal images using Nano Banana” (via Forbes).
It’s worth reiterating that ‘personal Intelligence’ is an opt-in featureset. You can also opt-out of Gmail’s smart features fairly easily if you’d rather Gemini didn’t go rifling through your inbox. First, open Gmail and click the big cog icon in the top-right corner. On the Quick settings menu, click ‘See all settings.’ Now, scroll down to Smart features and untick the associated box. This does mean you lose access to a number of AI-assisted features, including automatic email categories in your inbox.
In the case of both ‘Personal Intelligence, and Gmail’s AI features, Google assured last month that its AI isn’t snaffling up any of your data. This is in line with Google’s assertion last year that it’s not using Gemini’s Gmail integration to train its AI.
That said, no inbox is really an island. Google says in support documentation for Gemini apps, “When you interact with Gemini, summaries, excerpts, generated media, and inferences from your relevant media, emails, and files may be used to help us answer your prompts. To make our responses relevant, helpful, and high quality, we train our generative AI models off of these summaries, excerpts, generated media, and inferences.”
In other words, Gemini won’t steal your photos or emails for training, but it will retain the conversations you’ve had about them and elements of that data may then be used to train the model. Even with this degree of separation, I still wouldn’t want to allow any AI model to rifle through my personal data—especially not to create personalised, AI-generated memes based on my phone’s photos. My digital memories are worth more than that—or, at the very least, they’re worth an authentically terrible Photoshop attempt.
