Google is spending $185 billion on AI this year. They need you using Gemini t...

Google is spending $185 billion on AI this year. They need you using Gemini to justify it.

And they've designed the opt-out so you won't.

Ars Technica dug into Gemini's privacy controls today and the findings are rough. Gemini is on by default in Gmail and Drive. When it summarizes your emails, those summaries feed Google's training data.

Want to stop that? You have to find a setting called "Gemini Apps Activity" (buried multiple clicks deep, not linked from Google's own privacy page) and turn it off. Which also deletes your entire chat history.

It gets worse. Want to turn off Gemini in Gmail specifically? The toggle is labeled "Smart Features" — and flipping it also kills your inbox tabs, Smart Compose, and package tracking. Then Gmail hits you with a pop-up asking if you want to turn everything back on. Including Gemini.

Harry Brignull (the researcher who literally coined "dark pattern" back in 2010) called it what it is: pre-selection bias buried in settings that companies know from their own analytics almost nobody will find.

Here's what this means for your business: every AI tool your team uses has default settings. Those defaults were chosen by the vendor to maximize adoption, not to protect your data. And most of your employees will never change them (because the vendors designed it that way).

One thing you can do this week: pick your three most-used AI-connected tools and check what's on by default. Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, whatever your team runs on. Look for what data is being shared, with whom, and what you lose if you turn it off.

The vendors are betting you won't look. That's the whole strategy.