Notices by Miguel Afonso Caetano (remixtures@tldr.nettime.org)

"[i]n the chaotic aftermath of the shooting, one thing became immediately clear: The Trump administration was lying about what happened.

Shortly after news began circulating about the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement on X that “rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and the White House adviser Stephen Miller also described the incident as “domestic terrorism,” while President Donald Trump posted on his social network that Good “ran over the ICE Officer.”

Videos of the incident, taken by bystanders, show almost every element of McLaughlin’s statement to be false. There were no riots at the scene, and no rioters. The vehicle appears to be driving away from the armed federal agents, not toward them, and no one was run over. And there is no evidence that terrorism of any kind was involved.
(...)
The blatant lies about Minneapolis serve several purposes. They perpetuate the false narrative that federal agents are in constant peril and therefore justified in using lethal force at the slightest hint of danger. They assure federal agents that they can harm or even kill American citizens with impunity, and warn those who might be moved to protest Trump’s immigration policies of the same thing. Perhaps most grim, they communicate to the public that if you happen to be killed by a federal agent, your government will bear false witness to the world that you were a terrorist."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/ice-defense-minnesota-killing/685549/?gift=SCYx-5scVta3-cr_IlgTyb8Q5BokqAExuClP-mrxf8s

#USA #Trump #Fascism #ICE #PoliceState #Militarism #Militias

"Two decades ago, Richard N. Haass, a senior foreign-policy official in the George W. Bush administration, confessed that he would go to his grave not knowing why the United States had invaded Iraq. “A decision was not made,” Haass told me. “A decision happened, and you can’t say when or how.” I thought of this astonishing remark after Saturday’s military action in Caracas. President Donald Trump and his advisers have thrown out numerous justifications for seizing the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife and bringing them to New York for trial. None of them makes sense.

Maduro ruled Venezuela viciously and illegitimately, but Trump has no qualms about doing business with the vicious and illegitimate—he prefers them to democratically elected leaders. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told skeptics in Congress that the operation wasn’t an act of war at all, but a simple arrest based on Maduro’s indictment for drug trafficking. Then why, at the end of last year, did Trump pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, the ex-president of Honduras who had been convicted of the same crime by an American court and sentenced to 45 years in prison?

If narco-terrorism is a threat to U.S. security, Venezuela is a relatively small player in the global narcotics trade; the chief drug it exports, cocaine, is not a mass killer of Americans like fentanyl is, and the probable destination of the alleged drug boats that U.S. forces have been bombing off the Venezuelan coast was Europe."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/venezuela-iraq-hypocrisy/685547/

#USA #Trump #Imperialism #Iraq #Venezuela #Oil #FossilFuels

"On Wednesday afternoon, ICE agents carrying out an operation in south Minneapolis were briefly obstructed by a car blocking traffic. ICE agents approached the female driver, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, yelling, “Get out of the fucking car,” and one of them attempted to open the driver’s-side door. After the driver backed up to turn around and move, another agent drew his gun and unloaded three shots into the car. The car barreled into a light pole about 100 feet down the road, and the driver was quickly pronounced dead.

This is confirmed by eyewitness accounts and videos from multiple angles. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), while confirming the broad details, claims that the ICE agent acted in self-defense to avoid being run over by the vehicle.

These are the kinds of disputes that the courts are equipped to handle. Because if an agent shot directly into a car and killed the driver without some credible fear of personal harm, it would be called murder. And federal agents can indeed be prosecuted for murder.

States can prosecute anyone for violations of state law, regardless of their rank or authority. Murder is a felony in the state of Minnesota, as it is in every other state. Within the last several years, we saw Minnesota successfully prosecute a murder, committed by a law enforcement officer, that was documented on tape and broadcast to the world."

https://prospect.org/2026/01/07/ice-agents-can-be-charged-with-murder/

#USA #Trump #Minnesota #Minneapolis #ICE #Immigration #PoliceState #Militias #Militarism

"President Donald Trump’s Cabinet officials are scheduling their first formal calls with oil company CEOs to press them to revive Venezuela’s flagging oil production, four people familiar with the conversations told POLITICO.

Calls that Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum are planning with chief executives represent some of the first official outreach that the administration has made to the U.S. companies after months of informal discussions with people in the sector, these people said — days after President Donald Trump told reporters that “our very large United States oil companies” will “spend billions of dollars” in Venezuela.

However, the companies’ executives remain wary of entering a socialist-ruled country that was plunged into political upheaval after U.S. forces took strongman Nicolás Maduro into custody over the weekend, following decades of neglect in its nationalized oil fields, according to market analysts and industry officials.

Industry officials are also discussing what types of incentives would be needed to get them to return to the country, according to two industry officials familiar with the plans who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. Those could include having the U.S. government signing contracts guaranteeing payment and security or forming public-private joint ventures.

Even if they don’t yet have fully formed ideas for what would get them to invest in Venezuela, Trump’s insistence is difficult to ignore, said one former administration agency head who was granted anonymity to discuss the evolving matters."

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/05/trump-venezuela-oil-fields-00710893

#USA #Trump #Venezuela #Oil #BigOil #FossilFuels

"The United States’ oil industry appears wary of President Donald Trump’s repeated pledges that companies are going to spend billions of dollars upgrading decrepit Venezuelan oil infrastructure following the capture of Nicolás Maduro.

The companies themselves have stayed largely silent since Saturday, when Trump promised that the American oil industry would “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”

None has provided on-the-record statements about their plans beyond Chevron, which said it was focused on protecting its assets in the country. And the American Petroleum Institute, the leading industry association for American oil and gas companies, has not met with the Trump administration about this issue.

Rather, oil analysts have made clear that American and multinational oil giants don’t have an economic incentive to pony up investments in Venezuela, despite it being home to the largest oil reserves in the world.

Unless the Trump administration can address the serious safety issues, fear of regime instability, and longstanding legal concerns, the president’s pledge to “take the oil” remains a giant question mark.

“I really don’t know, who are the players that win from this?” said Ed Hirs, an energy markets analyst and professor at the University of Houston. “It’s not obvious, that’s for sure.”"

https://www.notus.org/energy/trump-pledge-us-oil-investment-venezuela-industry-silent

That's Late Stage Capitalism for you:

"More than 20% of the videos that YouTube’s algorithm shows to new users are “AI slop” – low-quality AI-generated content designed to farm views, research has found.

The video-editing company Kapwing surveyed 15,000 of the world’s most popular YouTube channels – the top 100 in every country – and found that 278 of them contain only AI slop.

Together, these AI slop channels have amassed more than 63bn views and 221 million subscribers, generating about $117m (£90m) in revenue each year, according to estimates.

The researchers also made a new YouTube account and found that 104 of the first 500 videos recommended to its feed were AI slop. One-third of the 500 videos were “brainrot”, a category that includes AI slop and other low-quality content made to monetise attention.

The findings are a snapshot of a rapidly expanding industry that is saturating big social media platforms – from X to Meta to YouTube – and defining a new era of content: decontextualised, addictive and international.

A Guardian analysis this year found that nearly 10% of YouTube’s fastest-growing channels were AI slop, racking up millions of views despite the platform’s efforts to curb “inauthentic content”."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/27/more-than-20-of-videos-shown-to-new-youtube-users-are-ai-slop-study-finds

#AI #GenerativeAI #GeneratedVideos #AISlop #YouTube

"The moment the British government began proscribing political movements as terrorist organisations, rather than just militant groups, it was inevitable that saying factual things, making truthful statements, would become a crime.

And lo behold, here we are.

The Terrorism Act 2000 has a series of provisions that make it difficult to voice or show any kind of support for an organisation proscribed under the legislation, whether it is writing an article or wearing a T-shirt.

Recent attention has focused on Section 13, which is being used to hound thousands of mostly elderly people who have held signs saying: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” They now face a terrorism conviction and up to six months in jail.

But an amendment introduced in 2019 to Section 12 of the act has been largely overlooked, even though it is even more repressive. It makes it a terrorism offence for a person to express “an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation” and in doing so be “reckless” about whether anyone else might be “encouraged to support” the organisation.

It is hard to believe this clause was not inserted specifically to target the watchdog professions: journalists, human rights groups and lawyers. They now face up to 14 years in jail for contravening this provision."

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/12/22/jonathan-cook-britain-has-officially-criminalized-journalism/

#UK #Starmer #Censorship #FreedomOfSpeech #Journalism #PoliceState

"The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has a new definition of “reasonable expectation.” According to the justices, it’s no longer reasonable to assume that what you type into Google is yours to keep.

In a decision that reads like a love letter to the surveillance economy, the court ruled that police were within their rights to access a convicted rapist’s search history without a warrant. The reasoning is that everyone knows they’re being watched anyway.

The opinion, issued Tuesday, leaned on the idea that the public has already surrendered its privacy to Silicon Valley.

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

“It is common knowledge that websites, internet-based applications, and internet service providers collect, and then sell, user data,” the court said, as if mass exploitation of personal information had become a civic tradition.

Because that practice is so widely known, the court concluded, users cannot reasonably expect privacy. In other words, if corporations do it first, the government gets a free pass."

https://reclaimthenet.org/pennsylvania-court-rules-no-privacy-in-google-searches

#USA #Pennsylvania #Google #Privacy #Surveillance #PoliceState

LoL. Would you expect any different outcome than this out of a industry built upon "citation cartels" where articles are made to be cited but not to be read?

"What Heiss came to realize in the course of vetting these papers was that AI-generated citations have now infested the world of professional scholarship, too. Each time he attempted to track down a bogus source in Google Scholar, he saw that dozens of other published articles had relied on findings from slight variations of the same made-up studies and journals.

“There have been lots of AI-generated articles, and those typically get noticed and retracted quickly,” Heiss tells Rolling Stone. He mentions a paper retracted earlier this month, which discussed the potential to improve autism diagnoses with an AI model and included a nonsensical infographic that was itself created with a text-to-image model. “But this hallucinated journal issue is slightly different,” he says.

That’s because articles which include references to nonexistent research material — the papers that don’t get flagged and retracted for this use of AI, that is — are themselves being cited in other papers, which effectively launders their erroneous citations. This leads to students and academics (and any large language models they may ask for help) identifying those “sources” as reliable without ever confirming their veracity. The more these false citations are unquestioningly repeated from one article to the next, the more the illusion of their authenticity is reinforced. Fake citations have turned into a nightmare for research librarians, who by some estimates are wasting up to 15 percent of their work hours responding to requests for nonexistent records that ChatGPT or Google Gemini alluded to."

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-chatbot-journal-research-fake-citations-1235485484/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Hallucinations #Chatbots #LLMs #Science #AcademicPublishing

“Bad research isn’t new,” Moser points out. “LLMs have amplified the problem dramatically, but there was already tremendous pressure to publish and produce, and there were many bad papers using questionable or fake data, because higher education has been organized around the production of knowledge-shaped objects, measured in citations, conferences, and grants.”

Craig Callender, a philosophy professor at the University of California San Diego and president of the Philosophy of Science Association, agrees with that assessment, observing that “the appearance of legitimacy to non-existent journals is like the logical end product of existing trends.” There are already journals, he explains, that accept spurious articles for profit, or biased ghost-written research meant to benefit the industry that produced it. “The ‘swamp’ in scientific publishing is growing,” he says. “Many practices make existing journals [or] articles that aren’t legitimate look legitimate. So the next step to non-existent journals is horrifying but not too surprising.”

Adding AI to the mix means that “swamp” is growing fast, Callender says. “For instance, all of this gets compounded in a nearly irreversible way with AI-assisted Google searches. These searches will only reinforce the appearance that these journals exist, just as they currently reinforce a lot of disinformation.”

RT @TheHackersNews
🚨 WARNING: A “Featured” Chrome extension was silently copying everything users typed into ChatGPT and other AI tools.

Prompts. Responses. Sent off-device by default after an auto-update.

It even warned users about sharing sensitive info, while exporting the full chats itself.

🔗 Read: https://thehackernews.com/2025/12/featured-chrome-browser-extension.html

"On a Thursday in early September, more than 40 strangers logged in to Instacart, the grocery-shopping app, to buy eggs and test a hypothesis.

Connected by videoconference, they simultaneously selected the same store — a Safeway in Washington, D.C. — and the same brand of eggs. They all chose pickup rather than delivery.

The only difference was the price they were offered: $3.99 for a couple of lucky shoppers. $4.59 or $4.69 for others. And a few saw a price of $4.79 — 20 percent more than some others, for the exact same product.

The shoppers were volunteers, participating in a study published on Tuesday and organized by the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive policy group, and Consumer Reports, a nonprofit consumer publication. In tests in four cities across the country, nearly 200 volunteers checked prices on 20 grocery items on Instacart.

On item after item, they found significant differences. In a Target in North Canton, Ohio, some shoppers were charged $3.59 for a jar of Skippy peanut butter that others could get for $2.99. At a Safeway in Seattle, some people paid $3.99 for a box of Wheat Thins while others paid $4.89. And at a Target in St. Paul, Minn., some people were charged $4.59 for a box of Cheerios that others could get for $3.99.

“Two shoppers who are buying the exact same item from the exact same store at the exact same time are getting different prices,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative. “The data really backs up how extraordinarily pervasive this is.”
(...)
Groundwork’s findings are the latest example of how the notion of a single price, offered to all customers for a predictable period, is breaking down in the digital age. Companies are using sophisticated algorithms to adjust prices quickly in response to competitors’ offers and consumer behavior."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/business/instacart-algorithmic-pricing.html

#USA #AlgorithmicPricing #DynamicPricing #Insatacart #Inflation #Algorithms

"Whatever the exact reason or the precise triggering event, Kirchner appears to have recently lost faith in the strategy of nonviolence, at least briefly. This alleged moment of crisis led to his expulsion from Stop AI, to a series of 911 calls placed by his compatriots, and, apparently, to his disappearance. His friends say they have been looking for him every day, but nearly two weeks have gone by with no sign of him.

Although Kirchner’s true intentions are impossible to know at this point, and his story remains hazy, the rough outline has been enough to inspire worried conversation about the AI-safety movement as a whole. Experts disagree about the existential risk of AI, and some people think the idea of superintelligent AI destroying all human life is barely more than a fantasy, whereas to others it is practically inevitable. “He had the weight of the world on his shoulders,” Wynd Kaufmyn, one of Stop AI’s core organizers, told me of Kirchner. What might you do if you truly felt that way?

“I am no longer part of Stop AI,” Kirchner posted to X just before 4 a.m. Pacific time on Friday, November 21. Later that day, OpenAI put its San Francisco offices on lockdown, as reported by Wired, telling employees that it had received information indicating that Kirchner had “expressed interest in causing physical harm to OpenAI employees.”"

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/12/sam-kirchner-missing-stop-ai/685144/?gift=l2EGC0_Zx5wZQufB4Ch0amjIJM8vDmzCJR4yhsvO6xs&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #StopAI #Activism #BigTech

"New technologies expand human capabilities, but they tend to do so at a cost. Writing diminished the importance of memory, and calculators devalued basic arithmetic skills, as the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah recently wrote in this magazine. The internet, too, has rewired our brains in countless ways, overwhelming us with information while pillaging our attention spans. That AI is going to change how we think isn’t a controversial idea, nor is it necessarily a bad thing. But people should be asking, “What new capabilities and habits of thought will it bring out and elicit? And which ones will it suppress?,” Tim Requarth, a neuroscientist who directs a graduate science-writing program at NYU’s school of medicine, told me.

Ines Lee, an economist based in London, told me that at times she has slipped into the habit of “not being able to start meaningful work without first consulting AI.” On her Substack, Lee has written that ChatGPT and Claude are now more seductive distractions than social-media apps such as YouTube and Instagram: She frequently turns to them to get her work done, even while feeling her critical-thinking skills may be atrophying in the process
(...)
The trouble with AI tools is that they seem to “exploit cracks in the architecture of human cognition,” as Requarth has written. The human brain likes to conserve energy and will take available shortcuts to do so. “It takes a lot of energy to do certain kinds of thought processes,” Requarth told me; meanwhile, “a bot is sitting there offering to take over cognitive work for you.” In other words, using AI to write your emails isn’t laziness so much as it is a naturally adaptive behavior.

Chatbots are engineered to take advantage of this human tendency by offering compelling answers to any query, even if many of those answers are false or misleading."

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/12/people-outsourcing-their-thinking-ai/685093/?gift=MEZMBcV7TNDAmi3wTlSAIfQUtAzTUmjtWH8wjQWxhIU

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #LLemmings #Chatbots #CriticalThinking #MentalHealth

"For all the alleged complexity of generative AI, at their core they really are models of language.

The problem is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language — and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own. Humans use language to communicate the results of our capacity to reason, form abstractions, and make generalizations, or what we might call our intelligence. We use language to think, but that does not make language the same as thought. Understanding this distinction is the key to separating scientific fact from the speculative science fiction of AI-exuberant CEOs.

The AI hype machine relentlessly promotes the idea that we’re on the verge of creating something as intelligent as humans, or even “superintelligence” that will dwarf our own cognitive capacities. If we gather tons of data about the world, and combine this with ever more powerful computing power (read: Nvidia chips) to improve our statistical correlations, then presto, we’ll have AGI. Scaling is all we need.

But this theory is seriously scientifically flawed. LLMs are simply tools that emulate the communicative function of language, not the separate and distinct cognitive process of thinking and reasoning, no matter how many data centers we build.

We use language to think, but that does not make language the same as thought."

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/827820/large-language-models-ai-intelligence-neuroscience-problems

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Chatbots #Intelligence #Reasoning #Neuroscience

"In December 2024, Amnesty issued an extensive study concluding that Israel is committing Genocide in Gaza, arguing that Israel had carried out three acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, including killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.

Today, despite a reduction in the scale of attacks, and some limited improvements, there has been no meaningful change in the conditions Israel is inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza and no evidence to indicate that Israel’s intent has changed.

At least 327 people, including 136 children, have been killed in Israeli attacks since the ceasefire was announced on 9 October. Israel continues to restrict access to critical aid and relief supplies, including medical supplies and equipment necessary to repair life-sustaining infrastructure, violating multiple orders from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for Israel to ensure that Palestinians have access to humanitarian supplies, in the case brought by South Africa to prevent Israel's Genocide. In January 2024, the ICJ found that Palestinians' rights under the Genocide Convention, namely their survival, were plausibly at risk."

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/israels-genocide-against-palestinians-not-over-despite-ceasefire-new-amnesty

#Palestine #Gaza #Israel #Ceasefire #Genocide

"This dissonant combination of commodity wealth and mass poverty is not unusual. To the contrary, large resource endowments appear to correlate with slower economic growth and higher corruption — a phenomenon that economists and political scientists have dubbed “the resource curse.”

Scholars have attributed this paradox to many different factors. But Drago and Laine emphasize one in particular: Large commodity endowments can reduce elites’ incentives to increase ordinary workers’ productivity.

Vast energy or mineral deposits provide investors with a ready source of profits — and states, with an easy source of revenue. The former don’t have to hazard capital on complex production processes to secure returns, while the latter need not bother with the headaches of forming competent tax collection services, the fiscal costs of developing a skilled labor force, or the political risks of cultivating an educated populace and diverse economy with competing power centers. Oligarchs and public officials can just feather their beds with commodity revenues instead.

According to Drago and Laine, AGI could fuel an even more extreme version of this dynamic. With the aid of superintelligent robots, the theory goes, capitalists won’t need to curry favor with pesky workers in order to turn a profit. And states won’t rely on ordinary people for tax revenue. To the contrary, as machines condemn most workers to perpetual unemployment, governments will have few funding sources beyond the windfall profits of corporations. The typical person’s economic leverage over public and private powers will be kaput. And states and businesses will have little material incentive to invest in their education or well-being."

"Among anxious laptop workers, these trends have fed half-ironic chatter about the coming of a “permanent underclass”: Once AI renders virtually all human labor commercially useless, most people will be condemned to eternal subjugation and precarity. No company will pay you for work that a robot can do better. And no market economy will let you climb the income ladder if your labor has no value. In Silicon Valley, such reasoning has generated a peculiarly dystopian variant of hustle culture: Make your fortune in the next five years, and you’ll claim a place in the perpetual aristocracy of AI owners — fail, and you’ll forever be at their mercy.

All these claims are wildly speculative. It’s not certain that today’s AI labs have functioning business models, much less the wherewithal to develop omnicompetent robots. Yet of all the nightmare scenarios spun by fatalistic futurists, AGI-induced neofeudalism strikes me as among the most plausible.

AGI may or may not decide to liquidate the human race. But it will tank the value of human labor, more or less by definition. We don’t know how ordinary people will fare in a world where the wealthy can do without their talents and exertions. But it is reasonable to worry that the answer is “not too well.” After all, there are already societies in which workers enjoy relatively little economic leverage over elites. And they typically aren’t nice places to be an ordinary person.

It’s therefore worth examining precisely how AI could generate an immutable oligarchy —and what can be done to prevent that from happening."

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/466025/ai-jobs-chatgpt-agi

#AI #AGI #SiliconValley #MassUnemployment #GenerativeAI

"Israel is continuing to lay siege to Gaza despite the “ceasefire” that officially took effect on October 10. On a daily basis, Israeli forces attack Palestinians in the enclave, killing more than 340 since President Donald Trump hailed his “peace” plan as a monumental accomplishment that would usher in a new era. The majority of the dead are women and children. Over the past week, Israeli forces, which still occupy more than 50% of Gaza, have penetrated deeper across the “yellow line” and Israel is threatening to restart its full-scale siege if Hamas does not disarm and surrender. Israel has also refused to allow in the agreed upon food, medicine and other life essentials to the enclave.

On November 17, in an unprecedented move, the UN Security Council formally endorsed Trump’s neo-colonialist plan for Gaza, including the deployment of an international force that would fall not under the command the UN, but operate at the direction of private board controlled by Trump. This force, according to Trump, would be tasked with disarming the Palestinian resistance and demilitarizing Gaza in an effort to strip Palestinians of their right to self defense.

In the latest in Drop Site’s series on the Palestinian resistance since October 7, Palestinian resistance leaders reflect on the path that got them here. We conducted a series of in-person interviews with senior officials from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They discussed the events that led up to the October ceasefire agreement, their position on disarmament and Trump’s Gaza plan, and described how they see the state of the Palestinian liberation struggle. This report from Jeremy Scahill and Jawa Ahmad is a long and detailed read, but we believe it is well worth your time. The failure of most Western media outlets to report on the perspective of the Palestinian resistance is journalistic malpractice and a disservice to public understanding."

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/hamas-palestinian-gaza-plan-trump-netanyahu-israel-ceasefire
#Palestine #Gaza #Hamas #Israel #CeaseFire #Trump #Netanyahu

"Under the radar, Google has added features that allow Gmail to access all private messages and attachments for training its AI models.

If you use Gmail, you need to be aware of an important change that’s quietly rolling out. Reportedly, Google has recently started automatically opting users in to allow Gmail to access all private messages and attachments for training its AI models. This means your emails could be analyzed to improve Google’s AI assistants, like Smart Compose or AI-generated replies. Unless you decide to take action.

The reason behind this is Google’s push to power new Gmail features with its Gemini AI, helping you write emails faster and manage your inbox more efficiently. To do that, Google is using real email content, including attachments, to train and refine its AI models. Some users are now reporting that these settings are switched on by default instead of asking for explicit opt-in.

Which means that if you don’t manually turn these setting off, your private messages may be used for AI training behind the scenes. Even though Google promises strong privacy measures like anonymization and data security during AI training, for anyone handling sensitive or confidential information, that may not feel reassuring."

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/11/gmail-is-reading-your-emails-and-attachments-to-train-its-ai-unless-you-turn-it-off

#AI #GenerativeAI #Google #Gmail #Gemini