"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.

“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, the Gmail upgrade 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 Google apps to Gemini . You should make a decision on this as well — it’s more intrusive than just email.

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.