WHY YOU SHOULD STOP USING GMAIL & OUTLOOK
Gmail and Outlook collect your personal data
Google no longer reads the content of your emails so it can target you with ads – a controversial practice it stopped in 2017 – but it still monitors your Gmail account and collects data about how you use the service. This includes details of when you send messages, who you send them to and where you send them from. It also checks the content of incoming messages to determine their importance and sort them into categories such as Promotions and Social, and – more invasively – logs your purchases, delivery tracking numbers and travel bookings.
Your Gmail emails are scanned using AI algorithms rather than by humans, which allows the service to detect and block spam, phishing scams and malware, but this compromises your privacy by automatically linking information in messages with your Google account. This is especially true if you’ve enabled Gmail’s ‘smart’ features such as Smart Compose, which makes suggestions as you type, and Smart Reply, which provides quick responses to emails so you don’t need to type them manually.
You can disable these features in your account settings on the Gmail website (click the cog icon in the top-right corner and choose ‘See all settings’) or in the Gmail mobile app (tap the three-line menu button and select Settings). Deselect the option ‘Turn on smart features and personalisation’ (see screenshot above right), choose ‘Turn off features’ and reload Gmail to switch off Smart Compose, Smart Reply, Nudges (which suggests emails to reply to) and other AI tools. This will limit the data Google collects about you through Gmail – but to prevent it completely, you need to switch to a more private email provider.
Similarly, Microsoft doesn’t scan your Outlook emails for advertising purposes, but it does collect data about how you use the service and uses AI to ‘improve your user experience’.
To limit the latter, click the Settings cog on the Outlook website, select ‘View all Outlook settings’ and choose ‘Compose and reply’. Deselect the options ‘Offer suggestions based on keywords in my messages’ and ‘Show suggested replies’. In the Outlook app, tap your profile picture then the Settings cog, select your account and switch off ‘Suggested replies’ and ‘Text predictions’.
Gmail and Outlook don’t provide reliable encryption
Although Gmail offers encryption over an HTTPS connection when you’re reading and writing messages, your emails can still be intercepted by third parties. This is because Gmail uses an encryption protocol called Transport Layer Security (TLS), which only secures your messages in transit if the recipient’s email service also supports TLS. Once your email arrives at its destination, the privacy of its content depends on the encryption used by the other person – TLS only encrypts the connection, not the message or attached files. Additionally, Google holds the encryption keys to your emails, which means it can easily decrypt them and pass their content to third parties such as government agencies.
One way to protect your Gmail emails is to click the ‘Toggle confidential mode’ padlock icon at the bottom of a Compose window. This prevents the recipient from forwarding, copying or downloading the content, and lets you set the email to expire after a specific length of time and lock it with a passcode (see screenshot below). However, Google will still be able to access your messages, even when they’ve expired or been locked.
Outlook only offers end-to-end encryption for your emails if you pay for a Microsoft 365 subscription. Without one, it uses the same unreliable TLS encryption as Gmail.
Gmail and Outlook’s spam filters are getting worse
Despite Gmail’s clever AI algorithms, many users have recently reported seeing more spam emails and phishing scams in their inboxes. This means that either spammers are finding ingenious new ways to bypass Gmail’s filters, or Gmail is becoming less effective at detecting junk messages – or both.
It’s also increasingly detecting ‘false positives’, when legitimate emails are misidentified as spam because they look unsafe or are “similar to messages that were identified as spam in the past”. This can result in you missing important communications, unless you remember to regularly check your Spam folder and mark the messages as safe or ‘not spam’.
Outlook’s junk mail filters are even worse, and phishing emails often slip through simply because they appear to come from a reputable company such as Amazon or PayPal. As with Gmail, messages erroneously end up in the Junk Email folder even when you mark their senders as being trustworthy – we’ve even seen emails from Microsoft suffer this fate (see screenshot below).