You may have seen posts claiming Google is now scanning your Gmail, including bank statements, medical letters, and tax documents, and that a lawsuit proves it. The real story is a bit more complicated than that, and worth understanding properly before you decide what to do about it.
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
What actually happened
In October 2025, Google changed a setting called “Smart features and personalization” from opt-in to on by default for Gmail, Chat, and Meet. This setting controls things like Smart Compose, Smart Reply, automatic inbox categorisation, and Gemini’s ability to summarise or draft based on your content.
A group of users filed a class action lawsuit, Thele v. Google, in a California federal court in November 2025, arguing that switching this on by default without clear notice violated California’s privacy law. The lawsuit claims Gemini could access the full history of users’ emails and attachments, including sensitive categories like financial and medical information.
Google disputes this characterisation. The company says these are long-standing, optional features, that they’re controlled by automated systems rather than manual review, and that Gmail content is not used to train its general-purpose AI models.
Where the lawsuit stands right now
This part matters and gets left out of a lot of what’s circulating online: in July 2026, the judge dismissed the case, ruling that the plaintiffs hadn’t shown a concrete enough injury to proceed. They’ve been given a window to file an amended complaint, so this isn’t necessarily the end of it, but as things stand there’s been no ruling in the plaintiffs’ favour, no settlement, and no finding that Google did anything unlawful. Treat claims that this is “proven” or “settled” with caution.
None of that changes whether you personally want this setting on. It’s entirely reasonable to want more control over which parts of your inbox get processed for AI features, regardless of how the case turns out.
How to check and change the setting
On Gmail, desktop:
- Click the gear icon → See all settings
- On the General tab, scroll to Smart features and personalization
- Uncheck Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet
- Scroll down and click Save Changes
There’s a second, separate control on the same page that’s easy to miss:
- Still on the General tab, find Manage Workspace smart feature settings
- Turn off both toggles there
- Save
On the Gmail mobile app, settings don’t always mirror the desktop version, so it’s worth checking separately: open the menu, go to Settings, select your account, and look for Smart features and personalization (on some versions this sits under Data privacy).
If you’ve used Gemini before, your past conversations may be saved. You can review and delete this at Google’s official Gemini Apps Activity page: myactivity.google.com/product/gemini. From there you can turn off Gemini Apps Activity and delete existing history.
Google’s own support documentation for these settings is here: support.google.com/mail/answer/10079371
If you want to go further
Turning off smart features stops Gmail content from feeding those in-product AI tools. It doesn’t change the fact that Gmail is still a Google product, and some people decide they’d rather keep certain categories of email, like medical, legal, or financial correspondence, somewhere else entirely.
If that’s a route you’re considering, a couple of well-known providers built specifically around end-to-end encryption and minimal data use are Proton Mail and Tuta. We’re not recommending one over the other, and there are others out there too; it’s worth comparing what each actually offers against what you need before switching anything over.
Over to you: did you know this setting had been switched on, and have you looked at your own Gmail settings before now?