Google has this pattern of all or nothing approach.
Maps refuses to show your *current* location if you don't enable location accuracy i.e. if you won't allow it to spy on your WiFi or Bluetooth it refuses to show your current location at all. GPS, what's that?
We can disable notifications and even phone access but physical activity is the one permission that cannot be disabled for play services !?
I've just turned off location accuracy, google maps displayed a popup said results will be better if I turn it on, and after dismissing the popup it did use GPS to localize me with no issues.
This is a risk issue. They need users to explicitly opt in or they risk user-data-related compliance suits. This has always been Google's problem, as an advertising company, and why they've taken so many seemingly awkward paths over the years with both Android & Cloud.
I don't trust any of the providers, but at the same time I think you're reading into the terms too much for wrong reasons. Yes, you have to opt out. But:
> A subset of chats are reviewed by human reviewers
This is expected these days for threads which may make the provider liable. Just look at the recent death case due to bad GPT medication recommendation.
> Chats reviewed by human reviewers [...] are not deleted when you delete your activity. Instead, they are retained for up to three years.
They're being retained for legal purposes.
> Please don’t enter confidential information...
This is so they don't accidentally preserve it for review, but also they don't want you to share private info that the agent will post somewhere without an explicit approval.
Those points make sense for them, regardless what other T&C rules apply.
What you describe is almost certainly what the legal team who drafted the terms and processes had in mind.
But there's two reasons to bring cautionary attention to it anyway:
1. As a user, I may not be okay with those terms as they stand and may not have the legal insight to have intuited them. In as much as I have a choice, because of those terms, I may want to use Gemini less/differently or look at other providers that have crafted less shrewd and defensive legalese and processes.
2. As a executive or manager at Google, whether working directly in feature management, or advertising, or government compliance, these same terms define the framework for anything I want to develop. What "makes sense" from a defensive legal standpoint today can the open door for an exploitative or otherwise unexpected use later.
I get what you're saying here in terms of plausible or justifiable "innocence", but that probably shouldn't get in the way of some critical personal reflection for users.
You cannot opt out, except by using only temporary chats. You cannot keep your chat histories visible to yourself only. If you want to access your previous chats, you cannot opt out of human review and training models on your chats.
> This is expected these days for threads which may make the provider liable. [...]
> They're being retained for legal purposes.
It’s a significantly wider usage than that:
A subset of chats are reviewed by human reviewers (including Google’s trained service providers) to help improve Google services. These include Gemini models, other generative AI models that power Gemini Apps, and technologies that help reduce unintended activations.
Reviewers assess if Gemini Apps’ responses were low-quality, inaccurate, or harmful. They also suggest better responses. We use their suggestions to help our models respond better in the future.
That’s in addition to the liability language:
Chats are also reviewed to keep Gemini safe and secure for everyone and to address violations of the Google Terms of Service, including the Generative AI Prohibited Use Policy. Reviewed chats are retained for up to three years.
imho you should act as if everything you type, not even send, is stored forever and might be used for training whenever they decide to retro actively change their TOS, no matter how much money you pay
Is there a way to use an API to export locally all the temporary chats and restore them as temporary chats for the next session? I am sure they’ll disable those eventually too, or even worse block your whole account for misuse.
I am not sure why anyone expected anything different from Google. This is a company that lives and thrives on user data and tracking users. Users are the material that is being run through this entire huge ad-selling machine.
I work with user data in Search and this is a common sentiment ... but I think it slightly misstates the purpose of using user data.
The primary purpose has always been improving search overall -- traditionally this has meant updating query interpretation, ranking, presentation, etc for smaller and smaller query slices ("Ah, when we show the mayor and the population in response to [Barcelona] people just revise their query to [Barcelona FC], so we should make sure to include latest match result on the top. Not so for [New York]."), and running tests on every product change to see what people like. In this case nobody cares about any _individual_ user's data, only the collective. This is basically the original "collective intelligence" contract of PageRank, albeit hillclimbing on billions of searches and clicks instead of using link structure. (Old question: does original PageRank count as machine learning, or not?)
Second is personalization -- things like "Oh, my flight or my delivery is expected on date X, handy that gmail popped a reminder on my calendar, good work Google." Or searching for a restaurant in Maps and seeing results that are biased towards the kinds of restaurants you already like, that kind of thing.
When it comes to revenue the purpose of these isn't to target ads, it's just to have you get value from and use the product, and when you are ready to spend money this is where you come to search for the thing, whatever it is.
Finally there is limited use of a limited set of data for ads relevance. There's higher CPC for ads you might actually be interested in (and if you are looking to spend money, is finding a willing seller who has compelling terms via an ad such a bad thing?) But ad revenue is mostly downstream of users being satisfied with the core product and using it more, whatever that product is. (Search, Maps, AI chat, etc)
(Bonus. My Search pro tip re: ads is leverage the modern stack and spell out your intent with a few more words when you query. We're pretty good at not serving ads for non-commercial queries. But old-school super short "searchese" queries make it hard to guess whether your intent is commercial or not.)
Would you prefer to not have people discuss the topic, just because you’re already familiar with how evil google is? Lots of younger people didn’t have out experience of seeing companies evolve into the current evil they are, or do not follow the industry
I know they say not to enter confidential information, but they are basically using the LLM to spy on users it's unfortunate. Even deleting chats doesn't help because they keep that information for another year or 2.
Even if they don't train on your content, Google reserves the right to use it for improving their services in other ways:
“
This license is for the limited purpose of operating the services, which means allowing the services to work as designed and creating new features and functionalities.
”
that's why i don't use gemini for anything serious or personal. if you want persistant memory you should enable keep activity, but keeping activity allows google to use your chats.
This why I advocate Deepseek, GLM, Kimi, Qwen as in hosted directly (send data) to China. Think about it, what can they do worse off than what our own backyard AI can do? There is no privacy advantage in Western AI. It is way more likely ours leak your data to dark web (solid track records for decades) or get law enforcers on you. Meanwhile, am I suppose to be worried, China sending their Ming-like Eastern Bureau to my home in the west? On dark web, aplenty western companies leaks. How frequent the eastern one?
That’s a take I see often, and it always overblows the direct personal threat while understating the more abstract societal one. A Western AI company might report you for plotting a murder or a mass attack, but that’s not the issue for most people. Mass observation of what society thinks deep down and manipulating it with that data is a problem for both, and maybe more so for external actors, since they don’t have even a remote reason to care about your well-being.
You’d maybe want to counter with something like 'But Google/Amazon/whoever just wants to sell me stuff!'. What makes you think that Chinese B2C would just pass on that opportunity?
What's worse is if you have a Pixel phone then Gemini is completely useless without enabling this setting.
I had it switched off:
"Hey Google, remind me at 7pm <something>"
"OK, your reminder is set for 7pm"
Next day:
"Hey Google, why didn't you remind me at 7pm"
"I can't do anything with your phone unless you enable chat history."
WTAF!
This was the case with Google Assistant too.
Google has this pattern of all or nothing approach.
Maps refuses to show your *current* location if you don't enable location accuracy i.e. if you won't allow it to spy on your WiFi or Bluetooth it refuses to show your current location at all. GPS, what's that?
We can disable notifications and even phone access but physical activity is the one permission that cannot be disabled for play services !?
Google apps have a lot of WTFs!
I've just turned off location accuracy, google maps displayed a popup said results will be better if I turn it on, and after dismissing the popup it did use GPS to localize me with no issues.
It's no wtf. Google is an ad company so they want all your data to target ads at you.
This is a risk issue. They need users to explicitly opt in or they risk user-data-related compliance suits. This has always been Google's problem, as an advertising company, and why they've taken so many seemingly awkward paths over the years with both Android & Cloud.
> Please don’t enter confidential information that you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see or Google
If Gemini has access to app data like gallery, mail etc that can also be subjected to human review? I imagine that will also be part of the context.
They are vague when they say 'don't enter'. Is it only prompts or does it also cover other data too.
I don't trust any of the providers, but at the same time I think you're reading into the terms too much for wrong reasons. Yes, you have to opt out. But:
> A subset of chats are reviewed by human reviewers
This is expected these days for threads which may make the provider liable. Just look at the recent death case due to bad GPT medication recommendation.
> Chats reviewed by human reviewers [...] are not deleted when you delete your activity. Instead, they are retained for up to three years.
They're being retained for legal purposes.
> Please don’t enter confidential information...
This is so they don't accidentally preserve it for review, but also they don't want you to share private info that the agent will post somewhere without an explicit approval.
Those points make sense for them, regardless what other T&C rules apply.
What you describe is almost certainly what the legal team who drafted the terms and processes had in mind.
But there's two reasons to bring cautionary attention to it anyway:
1. As a user, I may not be okay with those terms as they stand and may not have the legal insight to have intuited them. In as much as I have a choice, because of those terms, I may want to use Gemini less/differently or look at other providers that have crafted less shrewd and defensive legalese and processes.
2. As a executive or manager at Google, whether working directly in feature management, or advertising, or government compliance, these same terms define the framework for anything I want to develop. What "makes sense" from a defensive legal standpoint today can the open door for an exploitative or otherwise unexpected use later.
I get what you're saying here in terms of plausible or justifiable "innocence", but that probably shouldn't get in the way of some critical personal reflection for users.
You cannot opt out, except by using only temporary chats. You cannot keep your chat histories visible to yourself only. If you want to access your previous chats, you cannot opt out of human review and training models on your chats.
> This is expected these days for threads which may make the provider liable. [...]
> They're being retained for legal purposes.
It’s a significantly wider usage than that:
A subset of chats are reviewed by human reviewers (including Google’s trained service providers) to help improve Google services. These include Gemini models, other generative AI models that power Gemini Apps, and technologies that help reduce unintended activations.
Reviewers assess if Gemini Apps’ responses were low-quality, inaccurate, or harmful. They also suggest better responses. We use their suggestions to help our models respond better in the future.
That’s in addition to the liability language:
Chats are also reviewed to keep Gemini safe and secure for everyone and to address violations of the Google Terms of Service, including the Generative AI Prohibited Use Policy. Reviewed chats are retained for up to three years.
https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13594961?hl=en#huma...
Some important things to take away from this:
* They’re claiming to use chat transcripts for both training and for human review to improve training, not just for liability.
* They don’t define “subset”. It could be most chats.
* They make no promises of anonymizing content, just “disconnecting” it from the account.
* This is happening for free and paid user subscriptions, by default, and the only way to stop it is to turn off chat history altogether.
imho you should act as if everything you type, not even send, is stored forever and might be used for training whenever they decide to retro actively change their TOS, no matter how much money you pay
every thing you read, every keycap you press. Every mail you read, every call you make, permanently recording you
You'll never play that at a wedding.
OpenAI chat sends everything when you type. Better edit the prompt elsewhere.
Even before pressing enter? What would be the reason for that? Faster responses?
Predicting autocomplete for the prompt. They do suggest the remaining of the prompt. Not sure if that is the main purpose.
And just general tracking/analytics
It’s a terrible way to live. We built and are building such an anti-human society
Is there a way to use an API to export locally all the temporary chats and restore them as temporary chats for the next session? I am sure they’ll disable those eventually too, or even worse block your whole account for misuse.
I am not sure why anyone expected anything different from Google. This is a company that lives and thrives on user data and tracking users. Users are the material that is being run through this entire huge ad-selling machine.
I work with user data in Search and this is a common sentiment ... but I think it slightly misstates the purpose of using user data.
The primary purpose has always been improving search overall -- traditionally this has meant updating query interpretation, ranking, presentation, etc for smaller and smaller query slices ("Ah, when we show the mayor and the population in response to [Barcelona] people just revise their query to [Barcelona FC], so we should make sure to include latest match result on the top. Not so for [New York]."), and running tests on every product change to see what people like. In this case nobody cares about any _individual_ user's data, only the collective. This is basically the original "collective intelligence" contract of PageRank, albeit hillclimbing on billions of searches and clicks instead of using link structure. (Old question: does original PageRank count as machine learning, or not?)
Second is personalization -- things like "Oh, my flight or my delivery is expected on date X, handy that gmail popped a reminder on my calendar, good work Google." Or searching for a restaurant in Maps and seeing results that are biased towards the kinds of restaurants you already like, that kind of thing.
When it comes to revenue the purpose of these isn't to target ads, it's just to have you get value from and use the product, and when you are ready to spend money this is where you come to search for the thing, whatever it is.
Finally there is limited use of a limited set of data for ads relevance. There's higher CPC for ads you might actually be interested in (and if you are looking to spend money, is finding a willing seller who has compelling terms via an ad such a bad thing?) But ad revenue is mostly downstream of users being satisfied with the core product and using it more, whatever that product is. (Search, Maps, AI chat, etc)
(Bonus. My Search pro tip re: ads is leverage the modern stack and spell out your intent with a few more words when you query. We're pretty good at not serving ads for non-commercial queries. But old-school super short "searchese" queries make it hard to guess whether your intent is commercial or not.)
Would you prefer to not have people discuss the topic, just because you’re already familiar with how evil google is? Lots of younger people didn’t have out experience of seeing companies evolve into the current evil they are, or do not follow the industry
Use a self-hosted chat app with paid-tier of API tokens.
I know they say not to enter confidential information, but they are basically using the LLM to spy on users it's unfortunate. Even deleting chats doesn't help because they keep that information for another year or 2.
Even if they don't train on your content, Google reserves the right to use it for improving their services in other ways:
“ This license is for the limited purpose of operating the services, which means allowing the services to work as designed and creating new features and functionalities. ”
https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en-US#toc-permission
The training exclusion has always been a distraction. These service providers have plenty of other uses for your data.
I assume that everyone does this no matter what they say. Seems like too juicy a target
Obviously anthropic are doing this. Hence their "don't insult Claude too much" policy.
If a company can do something that benefits them, and there is no way the customer can find out or prove that, the company will do it.
training on "no i don't need google search to nurse me after a breakup, i was just asking what movie has the line she just dumped me"
Jokes on them all my gemini chat are youtube link I want a summary of
Joke on them all my Gemini chats are low-value questions I don't want to spend Claude tokens on
Then people are totally fine puting all sort of private stuff in Notebooklm or Gemini notebook.
that's why i don't use gemini for anything serious or personal. if you want persistant memory you should enable keep activity, but keeping activity allows google to use your chats.
It's just keeping track of all the times you were mean
Never trust google.
This is one of the reasons why I unsubscribed from Gemini Pro, apart from the fact that the experience with Gemini has been frankly underwhelming.
It might matter if Gemini was good enough to use but its not - I only use ChatGPT and Claude.
Their recent Argon is weak as well. But then they promise Carbon going to be world changing. Yeah sure.
For daily chat gemini is great.
actually even gemma locally is great for a lot of chat purposes.
Scary!
Every AI trains on the input given to it
This is false.
eg Gemini enterprise has a note under each chat session explicitly saying it’s not used to improve the models
We should all be writing bots that constantly spam all of these so-called AIs with random nonsense to poison the well.
Ah yes, the poison-the-product-you're-trying-to-use strategy
another Google W I guess? gemini really leading the pack over here
W I?
"...Google W[in,] I guess..."
This why I advocate Deepseek, GLM, Kimi, Qwen as in hosted directly (send data) to China. Think about it, what can they do worse off than what our own backyard AI can do? There is no privacy advantage in Western AI. It is way more likely ours leak your data to dark web (solid track records for decades) or get law enforcers on you. Meanwhile, am I suppose to be worried, China sending their Ming-like Eastern Bureau to my home in the west? On dark web, aplenty western companies leaks. How frequent the eastern one?
That’s a take I see often, and it always overblows the direct personal threat while understating the more abstract societal one. A Western AI company might report you for plotting a murder or a mass attack, but that’s not the issue for most people. Mass observation of what society thinks deep down and manipulating it with that data is a problem for both, and maybe more so for external actors, since they don’t have even a remote reason to care about your well-being.
You’d maybe want to counter with something like 'But Google/Amazon/whoever just wants to sell me stuff!'. What makes you think that Chinese B2C would just pass on that opportunity?