Yet another Hacker News

74 points jameslk 1 hour ago 31 comments

If you have a personal Google AI subscription, all your saved chat history in Gemini can be used for training and there is no way to opt out unless you turn off chat history or use temporary chat sessions. These chat transcripts may even be read by human reviewers. Although Google claims to disconnect them from your account when human-reviewed, they explicitly warn not to enter confidential information.

https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/16836988

“[Gemini app activity] is used to improve Google services for everyone, including by training generative AI models, if your Keep Activity setting is on.“

https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13594961?hl=en#human_review

“A subset of chats are reviewed by human reviewers”

https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13594961?hl=en#pn_retain_data

“Chats reviewed by human reviewers [...] are not deleted when you delete your activity. Instead, they are retained for up to three years.”

https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13594961?hl=en#pn_data_usage

“Please don’t enter confidential information that you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve our services, including machine-learning technologies.”

To disable their training on your chat sessions, you need to turn off “Keep Activity” in Gemini’s settings. Turning that off means you’ll lose any chat sessions after 72 hours.

I learned this too late, thinking that having a paid subscription = not being turned into the product. Apparently paying is not enough.

Thank you to this user on HN for mentioning in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50355424

r_lee 1 hour ago | parent

another Google W I guess? gemini really leading the pack over here

Aachen 57 minutes ago | parent

W I?

ForHackernews 56 minutes ago | parent

"...Google W[in,] I guess..."

icantevenhold 1 hour ago | parent

I assume that everyone does this no matter what they say. Seems like too juicy a target

2III7 33 minutes ago | parent

Obviously anthropic are doing this. Hence their "don't insult Claude too much" policy.

233mhz 1 hour ago | parent

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

usern20260720 40 minutes ago | parent

every thing you read, every keycap you press. Every mail you read, every call you make, permanently recording you

frereubu 23 minutes ago | parent

You'll never play that at a wedding.

nicce 34 minutes ago | parent

OpenAI chat sends everything when you type. Better edit the prompt elsewhere.

finger 16 minutes ago | parent

Even before pressing enter? What would be the reason for that? Faster responses?

nicce 14 minutes ago | parent

Predicting autocomplete for the prompt. They do suggest the remaining of the prompt. Not sure if that is the main purpose.

wewewedxfgdf 1 hour ago | parent

It might matter if Gemini was good enough to use but its not - I only use ChatGPT and Claude.

kuboble 26 minutes ago | parent

For daily chat gemini is great.

actually even gemma locally is great for a lot of chat purposes.

StanislavPetrov 1 hour ago | parent

We should all be writing bots that constantly spam all of these so-called AIs with random nonsense to poison the well.

Aachen 58 minutes ago | parent

Ah yes, the poison-the-product-you're-trying-to-use strategy

croisillon 36 minutes ago | parent

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"

realsarm 29 minutes ago | parent

Then people are totally fine puting all sort of private stuff in Notebooklm or Gemini notebook.

fweimer 26 minutes ago | parent

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.

whycome 25 minutes ago | parent

It's just keeping track of all the times you were mean

advenn 24 minutes ago | parent

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.

viraptor 21 minutes ago | parent

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.

jameslk 8 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/13594961?hl=en#huma...

frevib 21 minutes ago | parent

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.

jbrooks84 19 minutes ago | parent

Every AI trains on the input given to it

Havoc 4 minutes ago | parent

This is false.

eg Gemini enterprise has a note under each chat session explicitly saying it’s not used to improve the models

richrichardsson 17 minutes ago | parent

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!

Zeruxe 11 minutes ago | parent

Scary!