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Comment by mrbluecoat | Hacker News Reader

This.

I use POP and Thunderbird to download all my email and erase it from their servers so they can't later use it for AI training, ad personalization, persona tracking, etc.

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Unfortunately deleting your email probably doesn't "erase it from their servers". This was the substance of one of the old google location history lawsuits, where "erase my history" only erased your device's access to it. They retain a possibly transformed copy for training etc.

You don’t have an ability to “erase it from their servers”. There is no way to be sure they actually delete anything when you erase it, they could just be hiding the access.

Speaking as someone who worked in a large company before (although perhaps not Google-sized), and several smaller ones, they are very motivated to reduce storage costs whenever possible. Sure they could be "just hiding the access" immediately after you request them to delete, but that storage will likely be overwritten soon by something else.

> they are very motivated to reduce storage costs whenever possible

On the other hand, they are also very motivated to have a large mass of data to train their AI.

Which of the two motivations wins, is debatable. Today I'd bet on AI.

Training off data you published for public consumption, e.g. pretty much user-generated content on social media, or anything publicly accessible on the web, is one thing. Training off private conversations is a whole different thing. I doubt any major company is doing the latter. Would be a PR and legal firestorm. Which doesn't serve the interests of companies training AI models either.

Would you really put it past them? Gmail is after all a free service.

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