Heads up, Gmail users: If you don’t consent to Google automatically capturing the content and attachments in your emails to train its AI overlord, you must manually opt out in TWO places.
Personally, I don’t use anything Google: no Gmail, Chrome, or services, but I have friends and family who do. I’m letting everyone I can know what’s up. Anyway, here’s an article that lays out instructions for keeping your email content (marginally) your own.
Interesting, I wonder who technically owns the content of emails; the sender or the receiver. If it’s the former, which is what I would have thought as far as content and intellectual property goes, then the receiver’s setting should not be used to determine if they can scrape the contents of emails sent to them. In fac t they should never be allowed to do so!
In other words this suggests that if I send an email to a Gmail user, regardless of my views on the matter, it may get scraped by Google. Maybe I should stop ending emails to Gmail users?
I would imagine that google would go with the argument that the email lives on their servers and infrastructure, so they have the right to do with it what they want.
Sadly I suspect you’re right. It’s a difficult one, I can’t see an email send option such that it is only sent to servers that won’t scrape it!
(I didn’t ‘like’ your post because, though probably correct, I don’t like it! 
)
It appears that if a Gmail user doesn’t intentionally opt out of these now-default Gmail settings (again, users must opt out in TWO places), all content in email threads are subject to be captured and fed to AI, both the sender’s and those of the recipient(s).
Thanks @MikeC - sneaky little F-ers!
Thank you, god I hate all this AI garbage. These companies are gonna feed us this bullshit whether we like it or not.
My policy has always been to treat anything in email as being in the public domain. Too many ways to spy on email to make it secure outside of encryption. Texts same thing
Soylent Green is people!
Interesting, I’m UK based and my settings require me to opt-in if I want Smart features (which I don’t).
So what happens if I send an email to, or receive an email from, a person who has Smart features enabled ?
I like how at the end it says “Your preferences have been saved” like… yeah, we know you prefer that we not scrape your words and mail… but we don’t always get what we prefer…
I’m moving to a cave in the mountains.
Don’t forget to leave a forwarding Gmail address. 
I have to answer one of the US lawers I have asked for #not-legal-advice if you could sue Google for breach of the senders IP right, eg for using a demo for AI traning
I’m sure you already have agreed to it in the T&Cs you never read and blindly accept because you have to to use the product.
I find it funny how a “private” account would not have expectancy to privacy even to the one who store the files. At least to the degree where they don’t read the content except for eg spam filters etc.
Number 2 kind of just confuse me since I probably need a degree to understande where the line of somthing you have a copyright to start and where your email lose protection and to who
I guess that I will avoid sending emails in the future
Oh, they where talking about the text, not the attachment and got confused why I was asking about scraping music demos. There might still be some hope that it’s not actually allowed
So, follow up with the correct answer. It’s a rumor not based on any public information, the traning based on the text is probably true but not that any attachments will be used. At least as a #not-legal-advice
Thanks Mike. While that link may have been current once, Google is burying settings even further. A good illustration for gmail users is to set their sync to 3 days (close the app and then clear the cache). When launching gmail again, it should only show 3 days of emails… But it will show every email you have. That’s because they’re “training their AI”. There are already multiple lawsuits, and you can expect less and less control (or say) in your data. Oh, for the days where content really was marginally our own…
I’m UK based too, butI’ve just had to opt out. Saying that, I was living in Asia when I signed up to Gmail about nine or so years ago when Tesco decided to shut their email service down.
Mick C - thank you for the heads up on this!
