Google adds opt-out for Gmail’s ‘smart features’ to reassure regulators

Gmail users will finally be able to easily opt out of “smart” features that use their personal data to improve the experience, the company has announced, as it seeks to reassure regulators around the world that it offers genuine user choice around how it processes data.

Once it launches, a single setting on Gmail will ask users to decide whether to “turn off smart features” for their email accounts, disabling the personalisation that powers features including Smart Compose and Smart Reply. A second setting will also enable users to opt out of sharing their Gmail data with other Google services such as Maps and Assistant.

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“In the coming weeks, we’re launching yet another way to put you in control of your data and the Google experience, with a new setting for smart features and personalization in Gmail,” said Google’s Maalika Manoharan in a blogpost.

“The ability to turn on (or not) some of these individual smart features is not new,” Manoharan said. “What’s new is a clearer choice over the data processing that makes them possible. This new setting is designed to reduce the work of understanding and managing that process, in view of what we’ve learned from user experience research and regulators’ emphasis on comprehensible, actionable user choices over data.”

The new options are unlikely to fully smooth relations between Google and regulators in the EU and US, who have long criticised the company for privacy settings that theoretically offer users the ability to opt out of data use, but are hard to use in practice – and easy to accidentally reverse.

But they could go some way to assuaging fears around the company’s consent-based justification for processing user data, which led to a fine from France’s data protection watchdog in 2019. The company had previously come under fire for offering “my way or the highway” consent boxes, which made it difficult in practice for users to decline consent for data processing.

Alongside the new data settings, Google has rolled out an update for its Maps apps, adding in a number of features to help users navigate while staying safe in the pandemic.

Public transit directions will now show how busy a bus or train is in real time, based on data gathered from other Maps users. Food delivery apps, meanwhile, can now show their status directly in the Maps app, allowing people ordering food to track their dinner. And, in the US, a new state-by-state view will show the status of the pandemic at a glance, with states coloured red, yellow, or – in the future – green depending on their active case count.