Another Gmail AI warning.

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Updated on May 7 as another viral AI controversy hits Google users.

"If you have a Gmail account," Shark Tank’s Lori Greiner posted on Instagram this weekend, "do not ignore this warning." The star claims “Google doesn’t want you to know this, but they’ve been allowing AI to scan every single one of your emails.”

This is the AI upgrade that I have warned Gmail users about before. By enabling its new smart features, Gemini crawls through your inbox to deliver smart searches, contextual replies and email summaries. It’s clearly a major change and it continues to go live for ever more of Gmail’s 1.8 billion users.

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“Here’s the good news," Greiner says, "you can turn it off in 30 seconds." Users are told to disable the two settings that switch all this on. You’ll find those in Smart Features and Personalisation settings, where you can control it for Gmail and other products. But you can’t dip in and out. if you disable it, you lose new AI upgrades.

Google asks me to stress that all these features are optional and users always remain in control. They’re likely enabled by default, so you do need to act if you want to disable them. Google is more concrete on data training, assuring that user email content is never used to train its AI models through this upgrade.

While the viral post is new, detail on the Gmail update is not. What is new is the enhanced Personal Intelligence update that scans content across various Google platforms to storyboard your life, letting you opt-in to connecting apps to Gemini. You should make a decision on this as well — it’s more intrusive than just email and this is now going live to millions of users as well.

The Gmail update isn’t as binary as Greiner suggests. Most users will take the convenience and accept the privacy risks. While Google is not a privacy-first brand, it’s trusted to secure sensitive user information — from everyone but itself.

Google also assures that “Gemini in Gmail does not retain your data. We engineered it to work securely inside your inbox so that it only processes what you ask for, then leaves your inbox. Gemini only processes your information to complete your specific request, and doesn't hold onto that data afterward.”

Even so, you do need to make a decision on your red lines for such updates — and not just for Google and Gmail. It’s everything, everywhere these days.

With Greiner’s warning still fresh in users’ minds, there’s another Google AI privacy story making headlines around the world. “Google just gave me the best reason ever to uninstall Chrome," reports Android Central.

Meanwhile, Android Headlines explains that “Chrome has been secretly downloading a 4GB Gemini Nano model to your device," reporting that “a privacy researcher discovered Chrome is silently pushing a 4GB Gemini Nano model to user devices with no consent prompt, no notification, and no easy way to stop it. And the “AI Mode” feature you actually see? It still phones home to Google.”

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Google has dismissed this as a misunderstanding, with its boss Parisa Tabriz posting that “on-device AI is core to our developer & security strategy. We’ve offered Gemini Nano for Chrome since 2024 as a lightweight, on-device model. It powers important security capabilities like on-device scam detection and developer APIs without sending your data to the cloud.”

Google says it’s easy to disable and therefore uninstall, and that it will do automatically if the host device is short on resources. But it again illustrates that users will come to their own conclusions — helped by headlines — if the deployment of AI on their devices is at all unclear. It shouldn’t need viral stories and emergency explanations to manage such upgrades.