this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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Does anyone here have a gmail and can confirm if true?
I do still have Gmail, and a Pixel phone which I've since switched over to GrapheneOS. I signed up when Gmail was in beta many years ago, and for most of that time I thought it was great. (and I think I still even have the free 1gb of storage they threw at me.)
The article cites a feature called Personal Intelligence which for me was an opt-in feature, and I tried it for a day or so out of curiosity. It's basically you formally agreeing to let them mine your emails and Google searches and have those inform/weight your Gemini responses.
I fooled around with it a bit, asked it about my search history, and it did do what it said it would do, but like all these LLM products it would straight up hallucinate and fabricate all kinds of things that never happened.
It creeped me out, even without the failures so I opted back out. (And yes, before the lectures come, I know they're taking this data anyway and doing what they want with it without my knowledge. Google and I are in the midst of divorce proceedings, but I got so entrenched, that's a very messy marathon of a process.)
The kicker is Google punished me for opting out by removing the automatic sorting of emails into categories that Gmail has been doing (and doing quite well at) for a very long time now without LLM. (E.g. updates, promotions, social etc., leaving the truly important stuff in the main inbox.) So that sucks, but it also forced me to find better ways to clean that up.
I haven't got to the stage in our divorce proceedings where I switch to a different email provider yet. I'm dreading that, but maybe there are some FOSS tools that will make it not so bad. At the very least, I've managed to reduce exposure to Gmail by only interacting with that inbox using FOSS clients, and also using @ duck.com addresses for any new signups. I can recommend FairEmail for Android. I just downloaded the APK from GitHub, but you can also get it from the Play Store and on F-Droid.
I have a Gmail still, which I'm slowly trying to switch to Proton, but no, I don't use Google anymore, so can't confirm.