If you’ve seen the viral warnings urging you to uncheck a box in Gmail to stop Google from feeding your private emails to its AI, you can relax—mostly.

Social media has been lighting up with claims that Google quietly changed its policies to harvest your emails and attachments to train its Gemini AI model. The fix, according to these posts, is disabling "smart features." But Google says that’s simply not true.

What "Smart Features" Actually Do

This is the tech that powers spell check, filters your Promotions tab, tracks your Amazon packages, and automatically adds your Delta flight to your Google Calendar. To make those specific tools work, you have to agree to let Google "use your Workspace content and activity to personalize your experience."

Anatomy of a Panic

So, why the sudden freak-out? It seems to be a classic case of internet telephone.

Back in January, Google tweaked how these settings look. The update separated the controls for Google Workspace (like Gmail and Docs) from other Google products (like Maps and Wallet). The idea was to give users more granular control.

However, users stumbling upon the "personalize your experience" checkbox today are reading it through the lens of current AI anxiety. They see "use your content" and assume the worst: that their data is being vacuumed up for generative AI training. Google maintains these are two totally different pipelines. Your email content stays within your account ecosystem to provide services to you, not to the company’s large language models.

Why You Should Still Be Paranoid

Even if you trust Google’s distinction between "personalization" and "training," you should probably audit your privacy settings anyway.

If the idea of Google automated systems reading your emails—even just to be helpful—creeps you out, you can absolutely turn these features off. Just know what you’re losing: smart writing suggestions, automatic email filtering, and those handy calendar events will vanish along with the tracking.