Full transcript of “Gmail Users: Turn This OFF Immediately! (Google AI scans your email)”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 Google reads every single personal email you've sent or received on Gmail. If you're comfortable with this, well then click on a different video. But if that's kind of weird to you, you can actually turn this off. I'll show you how to do it on desktop and on mobile, both iPhone and Android. You're going to want to do this on every device that you have Gmail on and every account that you have with Gmail. You're also going to want to share this with people that you know, so that you're protected and they're protected as well. And leave a like on the video so this gets out to more people just like you. Now let's dive into the Gmail on desktop. So what this feature is is it's basically AI reading all of your emails. And you'll notice when you go to compose an email, when you're typing you might see something like help me write. And these
0:45 smart features, as they're coined by Google and Gmail, are essentially your emails being analyzed so that the AI has context to then write something for you. That's the only way they know how to reply to your email or to your contact's email. And the thing is, there's settings in here that actually enable it to use all of your content and information across the entire suite of Google products. So we can turn that off in the settings. Go up to the settings icon and then we're going to go to see all settings. I'm going to get rid of this composed message. Inside of the general settings, it's kind of hidden in the middle. So as you scroll down a little bit, we're going to scroll down until we start to
1:31 see a couple of these settings about smart compose, smart compose personalization. And if we keep going down, we see smart features. So we can turn off smart features with this checkbox right here. Now it's going to tell you that you're going to miss out on some features, you know? You're going to miss out on us reading your emails and giving you some features. That's okay with me. I'm going to turn off and reload this page. And so it's going to reload the page. And then I'm going to go back into settings. Go to see all settings again. And we'll see what's changed. When we scroll down a little bit now, we're going to see a few things in here that don't show up, like the smart features. And it really wants you to turn them on now, but we don't need to. But there's one other spot that you need to turn on, or turn off in this case.
2:19 And that's right here, Google Workspace smart features. We can manage these Google Workspace smart feature settings. And there's two settings in here that are hidden inside of this dialog window. Smart features and Google Workspace, and also smart features in other Google products. Basically, all of your emails can be used in all of these different ways. We can toggle both of these off. And then we can go down to save. Now, this also turns off package tracking, which if you receive tracking emails, Google and Gmail are actually able to look at those numbers and get into some of the information for package tracking and location data and all that kind of stuff as well. So, they know even more about you. So, that turned that off as well. There's one more spot here though,
3:05 if you're concerned about the emails that you get and being able to be tracked even by spammers and marketers. And that's called dynamic email and images. So, when your images load, basically, a hacker, a spammer can have just a one-by-one pixel image in the email that is a tracking pixel. And so, Google tries to load these images differently, but they don't always work. And so then, the person on the other end knows when you opened that email, they might be able to see location information, they know uh if you read the email, all this kind of information about it. So, images right here, I would always say ask before displaying external images. That also turns off this dynamic email. That protects you from that. Nobody
3:51 knows that information until you decide to download external images on that email. And at the very bottom of this, once you make any of these tweaks and changes, make sure you go all the way down to save changes. We want to make sure that we've actually saved this. In this case, ask to display external images. It can be kind of annoying, but it can also save you in a lot of cases. So, we click continue on that and we've saved all of those choices. And Google really wants us to turn on smart features. We don't need that, so we're going to click the close button. But this does not stop because your device also has these features. So, if you have an iPhone or if you're on Android, I'll show you where to change and turn off these settings here. In the Gmail app, there's a little
4:37 hamburger menu. It's on the left side, in the top left on both iPhone and Android, but we're on iPhone right now. Then it when I scroll down to the bottom, I'm going to see settings down here. So, we get into settings. And as we scroll through here, there's going to be some different areas to look at. For instance, email preferences here in inbox has the external image and dynamic email. So, we can actually turn that off here. Uh and ask before displaying external images, so we're not being tracked through these hidden images in our email. And then we go back to our settings. So, we turn that one off first cuz that's the first one we ran into. We have things like smart reply and smart compose. We should be able to turn these off without having to do it individually by going down to the data
5:24 privacy section. And it might not, so we'll see here in a second. But we go down to data privacy and we see smart features. So, we can turn off those smart features, which was the smart reply, smart compose, all that kind of stuff. But we also need to turn off the Google Workspace smart features. And it looks like those are toggled off from our account. But you notice that the other smart features were not toggled off on this device. So, you're going to go account by account and device by device to turn these off. I'm going to go back now. And one more spot that we can do is there are analytics and history that have already been saved. You can actually go to Google usage ID right here. And you can reset your Google usage ID,
6:12 which basically means Google's not going to link all of the usage metrics from before this point with usage metrics after this point. Well, now that we've turned off some of the stuff that they can read about us, the usage mesh metrics are going to be a lot different. So, we can actually reset that here. And now got a little bit more of a clean slate. There's obviously going to be more things that Google can track and see, but we are turning off some of the important stuff. If you're really concerned about data privacy, you can also turn off report additional diagnostics there because maybe you don't necessarily need any extra data reported to Google. And you can see clear search history here at the bottom if that's something you're interested in. But, now I'm going to go back into settings. It turned off our smart reply, smart compose. We turned
6:59 off the the tracking image property here in email preferences. And so, that's pretty good and we can hit done. And so, that protects our emails from being read by AI and Jim and I through Google. Now, on Android, we're going to want to do this as well. So, I'm on the same account here, but there are going to be settings that are still toggled on within the app itself. When we go into settings, scroll down in that hamburger menu, it's a little bit different. You're going to see the different emails that are connected. So, we're going to select the account that we want to change this setting on. And then as we scroll down and hopefully we don't go too fast and click on the wrong things, we're going to start to run into the smart features again, right? So, we got smart features. We can toggle that off. We got Google Workspace smart
7:44 features. We can check and make sure those are not on because that should be account specific. Looks like they're toggled off. That's great. Now, if we keep going down, we're going to make sure that our other smart features are toggled off as well. We have that send more diagnostic info so that they can make the product better. Well, they can make the product better with other people's info. They don't need mine, so I'll toggle that off. You can keep going down and we should see download attachments and images. I would not auto download attachments. You can always download them yourself. And then images, it's the same thing. Ask before displaying external images. We're going to toggle that on and make sure that's on as well. This protects your account as best as you can here in Gmail. But, you're going to need to do this for all your
8:30 different accounts and you're going to want to check each device and all of these settings on each device. Google can read your emails. They read every single personal email, banking information, tracking information, personal emails, health information, everything that's coming through email. They're reading it. They're analyzing it with AI. It becomes part of the data. And so, I think everyone should turn these settings off unless you're okay with that and you like the features that you're given with the smart reply and things like that. Uh but, that's how you can turn these settings off in Gmail and keep Google from reading your emails. Share this with someone you think needs to know it and I'll see you guys in the next one.
