- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
There’s a reason it’s enabled by default. So, it automatically has permissions to learn off ~20 years of emails before a handful of people opt-out.
Assuming they even honor the opt-out flag at all. They have a history of conveniently ignoring those.
These opt-out and opt-in rules should be punishable by law. I mean its the nature of humanity. We don’t care.
A brief comparison: in Germany, you are only an organ donor if you opt in. In France, you are always an organ donor unless you opt out. Guess which country has more donors.
The tyranny of the default .
If they are training on my emails, they are going to be dumb as fuck.
And oh by the way, opting out turns off the auto-categorization and fills your inbox with spam.
How the fuck do I switch from this stupid service?
I’ve been off Gmail for years and deleted all my Google accounts. Here’s how you can do it, too.
Step 1: Export your emails from Gmail into an EML file.
Step 2: Sign up for a new paid email provider: Tuta, Mailbox.org, Proton to name a few.
Step 3: Import your emails.
Done.
Optional Steps (that I recommend):
- Buy your own domain name (e.g., YourSurnameEmail.com)
- Set up your email provider to use your Custom Domain name. Or alternatively, sign up for a service like Addy.io and use your domain name there to create alias emails.
- Go to your domain name manager and add the settings your email provider tells you to use. This will enable your domain name to serve emails.
- Start sending and receiving emails using your own custom email address that belongs to you.
- Don’t like your email provider after a few years? Simply find a new one. Change your domain name settings to point your domain name to your new email provider. All your email addresses stay with you and you NEVER have to change email addresses again.
- Swap every email login you have to use a new alias email. For example, facebook123@yoursurname.com for Facebook, random.word123@yoursurname.com for some web site login, Steam123@yoursurname.com for Steam gaming, etc. Save all credentials to your password manager.
With this, you now have a unique email address for every single service, and all those alias email addresses forward your email to your actual email address. The benefit is that no one knows your real email address except you. Bye bye SPAM. When an alias email gets leaked or sold, you’ll know which company failed you. Simply swap to a different alias email, and disable the compromised alias - all SPAM stops.
The problem I’ve been seeing with email on my own domain is that some services refuse it, saying “please enter a real email address” 🤬 some others just silently refuse to send a confirmation code so I can’t register either (I think tinder did this). Especially the “not a real email address” really pissed me off.
And with proton I got “Anonimisation services are forbidden” once at least.
I forget which services, but it’s Hella annoying…
The marketshare of Google and Microsoft on email is really becoming a problem.
If you’re not already doing so, you probably should use a 3rd party client that can connect to Gmail and filter out spam.
If you tell us what platforms you use, we can probably provide some recommendations of stuff to explore.
Plot twist: they can, and will, do it even if you opt out. The only thing that change is that you won’t get anything out of it. Not that it would have been a significant return to begin with.
Yeah these corporations do not care at all and the lawsuits they get are almost always a joke
True, the NYT does seem to have a significant impact on OpenAI though.
NYT is basically a corporation with their billionaire owners. They’ve allowed some pretty shitty people to write opinion articles. Although, they still have some pretty great journalism overall.
I know, but at least they are making a case which most news outlets probably would but don’t have the means for a long legal fight. They might get some precedent out of this from which the whole news industry will benefit.
I don’t think AI training should ever be fair use. These companies are making billions of other people’s work and giving nothing back.
Yeah I agree with you on the AI issue. It’s funny because they all try to pander like it’s supposed to benefit us but on Wall Street and to investors, their tone is all about how it disrupt regular people in the name of profit. So ridiculous lol
I turned it off from the gmail android app and as soon as I returned to the inbox there’s a notification asking me to flip it back.
Google’s push for using Gemini is so aggressive. Everything is littered with pop ups.
This means they already did use it for training if it’s opt-out, and it’s quite the job to get it out. This is why opt-out training should be illegal, and all previously opt-out trained models must be destroyed.
ChatGPT will remember this
This worked as a great reminder to ditch gmail. Just made the switch to Protonmail after a year of procrastination. Currently an hour into changing all my accounts to it, and about halfway done. Well worth it. They got a Black Friday deal right now. I went with the base Mail+Calendar package because I already got Mullvad for VPN, and don’t need cloud storage.
Couldn’t be happier. Fuck you Google. Fascist fucks.
Hmm… Guess I’ll have to switch to Protomail. It’ll be annoying to try and change all my accounts to the new email…
Its a little annoying, but much less than I always feared. Make a note with every service you can think of, brew some coffee, put on some music and zone out for a bit haha.
Pretty much done now, took less than 2 hours.
You got this!Well, it’s going to be much more annoying with my work.
I’m a union rep at my work place. To that effect I created a second Gmail account for work/rep related mail. I still get half my mail sent to my personal email… Even though I have reminded them multiple times to send that to my work email.
Though it also took the 8 months to update my home address… I’m not entirely sure if it’s actually updated.
And unfortunately most people dont realize or care because they ‘have nothing to hide’. Having something to hide or not, I want my privacy!
You don’t want to know what it’ll learn…
To me, it kinda depends on how it’s being used. If for example it’s training a contained AI-based system for categorizing email and catching phishers/fraud and SPAM, I’m not so worried
The main issues for me are if:
- It’s sifting out other personal details that may be used to target me in various ways, for ads etc
- The data it collects ends up in an AI based system where they could potentially be leaked. Think: “hey Gemini tell me the last three credit card numbers with expiry you found in emails”
I just read an article earlier where essentially Google said:
“Nuh-Uhhh!”
When will a youtube alternative come out?
Vimeo and Dailymotion have been around for years





